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EDGAR ALLAN POE

A CRITICAL STUDY

ARTHUR RANSOME

NEW YORK

MITCHELL KENNERLEY

MCMX

' v i 0

1910

TO
MY WIFE

255444

PREFACE

POE is a writer whose work has come to mean
something quite different from himself. He has
been hidden by a small group of his writings. The
bulk of his work is covered away under a mantle
of the iridescent colouring of his tales. The popu
lar conception of him is so narrow and powerful
that it has made of him a legendary Faust, and it is
hard for us to say " Yet art thou still but Faustus
and a man," and, lifting that brilliant, shining
mantle, to unveil the real astrologer. There is
this traditional Poe to blind our eyes, and there
is also the hero of a new morality play, where
Art is Life, Beauty is Virtue, and Public Opinion
is the Devil. Baudelaire, and cheap editions of
his works, which take account only of his tales,
and, among them, of a single group alone,
combine to obscure him.

It would not be surprising if Poe had been
labelled out of existence, or fallen into a general
contempt. This is far from being the case.
Many are ready to discuss him, and to betray in
discussion the fact that they have not troubled

vii

PREFACE

to examine the subject of their argument. H
is praised and blamed for such details as th
talkers happen to have noticed in passing
Different men see in him momentary reflectior
of themselves, and, becoming interested, ai
disappointed to find that he has other facets o
which their image does not fall. He compels
respect to which, as an artist, he is not entitle<
so that those of his admirers who are obstinate!
determined to base their admiration on his ai
are driven to make excuses for him, even 1
themselves. His best things are so good th*
his readers are impelled to deny the badness <
his worst, instead of recognising that the grounc
of their admiration are false, and seeking a firme
explanation. That such an explanation is to I
found is proved by the fact that something i
the character of his mind moves those wh
dislike what they know of him to express the:
dislike with extravagance, and others to prais
no less extravagantly the tales and poems o
which they persuade themselves that their respec
for him is based.

There is no need, then, to apologise for a boo
that seeks to examine all Poe's activities in tun
and so to separate truth from tradition, and t
discover what it is in Poe that stimulates sue
violence of praise and blame, alike insecure!
founded. There is no need to apologise even fc

viii

PREFACE

failure in such an attempt. An admiration or
contempt that we do not try to understand is
more humiliating to the mind than none at
all.

I had become dissatisfied with my own respect
for Poe, because I could not point to tales or
poems that accounted for its peculiar character
of expectancy. I admired him, but, upon analysis,
found that my admiration was always for some
thing round the corner, or over the hill. In
reading and re-reading his collected works 1
learnt that, perfect as his best things are, he has
another title to immortality. It became clear
that Poe's brain was more stimulating than his
art, and that the tales and poems by which he is
known were but the by-products of an uncon-
cluded search. Throughout Poe's life he sought
a philosophy of beauty that should also be a
philosophy of life. He did not find it, and the
unconcluded nature of his search is itself sufficient
to explain his present vitality. Seekers rather
than finders stimulate the imagination.

Poe's circumstances were not those most
favourable to a philosopher of aesthetic. He
was ill-educated and seldom free from anxiety.
He lacked at once a firm foundation and an
untroubled atmosphere in which to build. But
he practised no art on which he did not write,
and wrote on few that he did not find oppor-

PREFACE

tunity to practise. He had a craftsman's know-
Jedge and much more, and, though again and
again a bias in his character, or a prejudice that
he had acquired, made his building impossible,
his efforts towards a system, embedded as they
are in all kinds of other work, foreshadow in an
extraordinary manner the ideas that are most
satisfying to-day.

In this book I have tried to trace Poe's
thought by discussing in the most convenient
order his various activities or groups of ideas. I
have tried also to draw a portrait of the man and
to strike a balance between his practice and his
theory. In a Biographical Background I have
tried to give this life of work and thought a
setting in the world, and, in a postscript, to follow
the gradual naturalisation of Foe as a_French
writer.

There are a few sentences in the book taken
from a previous short essay, published in my
History of Story -telling, and in other forms.
There seemed to be no sufficient reason for
obscuring by a paraphrase what was as clear as I
could make it.

Professor Woodberry very generously gave me
permission to quote from several letters that are
his copyright, and also to use his excellent book
on Poe (issued in " The American Men of Letters
Series " by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin of Boston,

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE vii

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND I

A PRELIMINARY NOTE ON POE'S CRITICISM 45

SELF-CONSCIOUS TECHNIQUE 6l

TALES 87

POETRY 115

ANALYSIS 149'

METAPHYSICS 169

FRAYED ENDS 193

POSTSCRIPT: THE FRENCH VIEW OF POE 217

XU1

BIOGRAPHICAL
BACKGROUND

IOGRAPHICAL
BACKGROUND

IT is only in exceptional cases that he who
would examine a man's work can refuse all
knowledge of its author, as a hindrance rather
than a help to his understanding. We do
not need much, but we are glad of much
from which to choose our knowledge. We

i recognise that his life, the physical facts of his
existence, even though they may not affect his

I work directly, are yet symptoms of the conditions
in which that work was produced. And on our
knowledge of those conditions depends at least
the accuracy of our re-creation of his work, our
reproduction of his picture as he intended it, our
reading of that unwritten book whose shadow is
given us in print and paper.

The life of Poe has been a battleground for his
biographers, and it is perhaps because of the din
and smoke of that field that what he wrote has

> been so obtusely comprehended. In the excite-

EDGAR ALLAN POE

m'ent ' of 'personal conflict with other writers,
conflict mainly concerned with the facts ar
legends of his life, and their judgment in terms <
contemporary morality, all but one of those wl
have written " Lives " of Poe have taken his woi
for granted, his uneven poetry, his affinity wi1
Baudelaire, his weirdness — there are a few oth
general headings under which, as it were I
mutual consent, Poe's work is labelled and le
out of the scrimmage, like the hospital in a sieg
For this book, concerned with the contents <
that hospital, we need only enough biographic
background to throw into the perspective of li
such an examination as we propose. We hai
no wish to expose the peace of mind that
necessary for our work to the rude shocks ar
countershocks of that smoking field. The batt
does not invite us, for it does not seem to us 1
be a battle about anything that matters. I wi«
to make it clear that in this chapter I am on
preparing the ground for our discussion. I c
not offer a biography of Poe, but set down, ;
briefly as I can, such facts as seem to be importan
passing over much, and reserving the right to 1
disproportionately detailed in treating anythir
that seems likely to throw any light upon h
work. There is already one " Life " of Poe ttu
is impartial, and written by a man who is himse
an artist. If I could be sure that all who rea

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

this book had read Professor Woodberry's I
would proceed at once to the more inviting
subjects of examination.

The opening scene of Poe's life might have
been taken from the story of a nineteenth -
century Capitaine Fracasse and painted by
Hogarth. The curtain lifts on the children, Poe
and his brother and sister, with a father and
mother, both poor players left in illness by the
travelling company to which they were attached,
living in a garret. The Hogarthian figure of the
group is an old Welsh nurse, who, to quiet the
children, took them in turn upon her lap and fed /
them with bread soaked in gin. The Welsh '
woman fantastically dressed, the gin, the squalid
garret, the dying parents ; the subject would
have delighted the most literary of painters. It
is like the first note in one of Poe's tales, fore
telling the inevitable end.

The Captain Fracasse of the story, whose
adventure turned out less pleasantly than that of
the adventurous Marquis in Gautier's tale, was
David Poe, the son of a Revolutionary Quarter
master-General. He married Elizabeth Arnold,
a graceful but not a superlative actress. She
had been married before, and when David Poe

EDGAR ALLAN POE

met her, she was known as Mrs. Hopkin
Hopkins was a comedian, and his widow becarr
Mrs. Poe within a month of his death. They ha
three children, William, Edgar, and Rosali
Edgar Poe was born on January 19, 1809. I
January, 1811, his mother was too ill to mo^
on from Richmond where the company had bee
playing. The destitution of the family becarr
known, and, when the children were left orphan
William, the eldest, was taken into the house <
relatives, a Mrs. Mackenzie adopted the litt
girl, and the younger boy was adopted by Jot
Allan, a tobacco-merchant. The girl became
listless creature, with vacuous eyes, a love <
flowers and a dislike of ugly faces. The litt
boy became Edgar Allan Poe, the writer who:
work this book is an attempt to discuss.

The Allans were rich, and the child, who w;
really an elaborate kind of pet for Mrs. Alia
was wild and lovely in appearance, precocious
speech and manner. He was indulged by tl
lady, and the business man sometimes, please
with his antics, followed her example, and som
times, displeased with his wilfulness, adopted
severity that was the more demoralising becau;
capricious. There are tales of a little boy standir
among the dessert, and, glass in hand, proposir
toasts. There are tales, too, of ungovernab
tempests of rage.

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

As a child, he knew the extremes of poverty
and opulence. The garret lodgings and the
comfortable household of the Allans struck con
trasted chords that, in different keys, echoed
throughout his life. He had the pride and the
sensitiveness to insult of the poor boy who has
become rich, and, when a starving man, his
wretchedness was intensified by the fastidious
delicacy of his tastes.

Ill

When he was six years old the Allans took
him to England, and, while they travelled, left
him in the Manor House School at Stoke
Newington. His description of this period of
his life (for it cannot be doubted that " William
Wilson's " schooldays were his own) is comparable
to Coleridge's memories of Christ's Hospital.
The sediments of impression that their schooldays
left the two men are characteristic of themselves.
Coleridge remembers his old master as a teacher
of what is true and false in literature. He gives
no picture of the man, nor of the grey cloisters,
nor of the sounding flagstones, while Foe, less
concerned with what he learnt there, is unable
to forget the pictorial, nervous impression left
upon him by his school.

Here are the paragraphs from William Wilson.

EDGAR ALLAN FOE

Very little in them seems to have been peculiarly
coloured for the purposes of the tale :

" My earliest recollections of a school-life, are
connected with a large, rambling, Elizabethan
house, in a misty-looking village of England,
where were a vast number of gigantic and
gnarled trees, and where all the houses were
excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream
like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old
town. At this moment, in fancy, I feel the
refreshing chilliness of its deeply- shadowed
avenues, inhale the fragrance of its thousand
shrubberies, and thrill anew with undefmable
delight, at the deep hollow note of the church-
bell, breaking, each hour, with sullen and sudden
roar, upon the stillness of the dusky atmosphere
in which the fretted Gothic steeple lay imbedded
and asleep.

" It gives me, perhaps, as much of pleasure as
I can now in any manner experience, to dwell
upon minute recollections of the school and its
concerns. Steeped in misery as I am — misery,
alas ! only too real — I shall be pardoned for
seeking relief, however slight and temporary, in
the weakness of a few rambling details. These,
moreover, utterly trivial, and even ridiculous in
themselves, assume, to my fancy, adventitious
importance, as connected with a period and a
locality when and where I recognise the first
ambiguous monitions of the destiny which after
wards so fully overshadowed me. Let me then
remember.

" The house, I have said, was old and irregular.

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

The grounds were extensive, and a high and
solid brick wall, topped with a bed of mortar
and broken glass, encompassed the whole. This
prison-like rampart formed the limit of our
domain ; beyond it we saw but thrice a week—
once every Saturday afternoon, when, attended
by two ushers, we were permitted to take brief
wralks in a body through some of the neighbour
ing fields — and twice during Sunday, when we
were paraded in the same formal manner to the
morning and evening service in the one church
of the village. Of this church the principal of
our school was pastor. With how deep a spirit
of wonder and perplexity was I wont to regard
him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with
step solemn and slow, he ascended the pulpit !
This reverend man, with countenance so de
murely benign, with robes so glossy and so
clerically flowing, with wig so minutely pow
dered, so rigid arid so vast, — could this be he
who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy
habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the
Draconian laws of the academy ? Oh, gigantic
paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution !

" At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned
a more ponderous gate. It was riveted and
studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with
jagged iron spikes. What impressions of deep
awe did it inspire ! It was never opened save
for the three periodical egressions and ingressions
already mentioned ; then, in every creak of its
mighty hinges, we found a plenitude of mystery
—a world of matter for solemn remark, or for
more solemn meditation.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

" The extensive enclosure was irregular in
form, having many capacious recesses. Of these,
three or four of the largest constituted the play
ground. It was level, and covered with line
hard gravel. I well remember it had no trees,
nor benches, nor anything similar within it. Oi
course it was in the rear of the house. In front
lay a small parterre, planted with box and other
shrubs ; but through this sacred division we
passed only upon rare occasions indeed — such as
a first advent to school or final departure thence,
or perhaps, when a parent or friend having called
for us, we joyfully took our way home for the
Christmas or Midsummer holidays.

" But the house ! — how quaint an old building
was this ! — to me how veritably a palace of
enchantment ! There was really no end to its
windings — to its incomprehensible subdivisions.
It was difficult, at any given time, to say with
certainty upon which of its two stories one
happened to be. From each room to every
other there were sure to be found three or four
steps either in ascent or descent. Then the
lateral branches were innumerable — inconceiv
able — and so returning in upon themselves, that
our most exact ideas in regard to the whole
mansion were not very far different from those
with which we pondered upon infinity. During
the five years of my residence here, I was never
able to ascertain with precision, in what remote
locality lay the little sleeping apartment assigned
to myself and some eighteen or twenty other
scholars.

" The school-room was the largest in the

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

house — I could not help thinking, in the world.
It was very long, narrow, and dismally low, with
pointed Gothic windows and a ceiling of oak.
In a remote and terror-inspiring angle was a
square enclosure of eight or ten feet, comprising
the sanctum, 'during hours,' of our principal,
the Reverend Dr. Bransby. It was a solid
structure, with massy door, sooner than open
which in the absence of the * Dominie,' we
would all have willingly perished by the peine
forte et dure. In other angles were two other
similar boxes, far less reverenced, indeed, but
still greatly matters of awe. One of these was
the pulpit of the ' classical ' usher, one of the
6 English and mathematical.' Interspersed about
the room, crossing and recrossing in endless irre
gularity, were innumerable benches and desks,
black, ancient, and time-worn, piled desperately
with much-bethumbed books, and so beseamed
with initial letters, names at full length, gro
tesque figures, and other multiplied efforts of the
knife, as to have entirely lost what little of
original form might have been their portion in
days long departed. A huge bucket with water
stood at one extremity of the room, and a clock
of stupendous dimensions at the other.

" Encompassed by the massy walls of this
venerable academy, I passed, yet not in tedium
or disgust, the years of the third lustrum of my
life. The teeming brain of childhood requires
no external world of incident to occupy or amuse
it ; and the apparently dismal monotony of a
school was replete with more intense excitement
than my riper youth has derived from luxury, or

EDGAR ALLAN POE

my full manhood from crime. Yet I must be
lieve that my first mental development had in it
much of the uncommon — even much of the outre.
Upon mankind at large the events of very early
existence rarely leave in mature age any definite
impression. All is grey shadow — a weak and
irregular remembrance — an indistinct regathering
of feeble pleasures and phantasmagoric pains.
With me this is not so. In childhood I must
have felt with the energy of a man what I now
find stamped upon memory in lines as vivid, as
deep, and as durable as the exergues of the
Carthaginian medals."

He was eleven years old when he left.

On the return of the family to America, Poe
was sent to a day-school at Richmond, where his
adopted parents lived. He slept and passed his
evenings at the tobacco-merchant's, and spent his
days among the usual classical authors, and in
adding to his knowledge of French, as well as
in hardening his muscles with athletics. He
was a good fencer and a powerful swimmer. One
hot June day he swam over seven miles " against
a tide running probably from two to three miles
an hour."* Facts like these help to give bodily
existence and credibility even to such a walker

* Griswold.
12

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

under the bat's wing and crescent moon as Foe,
just as our understanding of Keats is fortified by
the knowledge that upon occasion he was ready
and able to chastise a butcher.

But, simultaneously with these quite fleshly
schooldays, were passing days of another kind,
and nearer to the shades that were to rule the
man. He fell in love, and in such a manner as
to suggest a darker lining to the silver cloud his
schooldays seem. Only when a boy is very lonely
do a few kind words from a woman make any
deep impression on his mind. One such boy,
outwardly happy enough, was surprised by his
schoolmaster's wife laying her hand on his shoulder
and calling him " old man." So novel and un
expected was the endearment, that, secretly, in
a corner of the playground, he wept throughout
a summer afternoon. I think a similar feeling
must have been the origin of Foe's first love
affair. One day, when Foe was at the house of
a schoolfellow, he met the boy's mother.

" This lady, on entering the room, took his
hand and spoke some gentle and gracious words
of welcome, which so penetrated the sensitive
heart of the orphan boy as to deprive him of the
power of speech, and, for a time, almost of con
sciousness itself. He returned home in a dream,
with but one thought, one hope in life — to hear
again the sweet and gracious words that had

EDGAR ALLAN POE

made the desolate world so beautiful to him, and
filled his lonely heart with the oppression of a new
joy. This lady afterwards became the confidant
of all his boyish sorrows, and hers was the
redeeming influence that saved and guided him
in the earlier days of his turbulent and passionate
youth. After the visitation of strange and
peculiar sorrows she died, and for months after
her decease it was his habit to visit nightly the
cemetery where the object of his boyish idolatry
lay entombed."

I tell this story in the words of a slim and
ladylike little book, one of those that took part
in the battle over Poe's character.* It was pub
lished eleven years after his death, and, though
the writer cannot help trying to lift the facts
into the atmosphere of romance, they have not
been denied by his biographers. The same
writer tells us that Poe spoke of this affection
as "the one, idolatrous, and purely ideal love"
of his boyhood. In the Marginalia, writing of
Byron, he quotes from Madame Dudevant,
" ' Les anges ne sont plus pures que le cceur d'un
jeune homme qui aime en verite ' (' The angels
are not more pure than the heart of a young
man who loves with fervour'). The hyperbole
is scarcely less than true. It would be truth
itself, were it averred of the love of him who is

* Edgar Poe and his Critics. By Sarah Helen Whitman.

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

at the same time young and a poet. The boyish
poet-love is indisputably that one of the human
sentiments which most nearly realises our dream
of the chastened voluptuousness of heaven." Poe
was a boy of fourteen and a poet. It is possible
for such to love from the heart upwards, and,
even while living an athletic youth, to look out
from the frame of this love with the same aloof
and almost pitying eyes as those of a child who
is happy enough to exist in a painting by Sandro
Botticelli.* This kindly woman, who died so
soon after he met her, left her image to the boy
as the rough sketch of that ideal Lenore who
wras to thread her ghostly way through his
phantasmal poetry.

Without some such experience, much of his
work would have been other than it was. I
think, too, that it is perhaps important to notice
that he suffered it at this time. He left school
not long after her death, and the time between
his schooldays and his entry of the Virginia
University, a year free for idleness and self-
examination, probably did much in inking-in the
pencilled outlines of his character. He must

* When I noted this, I was thinking of a picture, not by
Botticelli, but by one of Botticelli's school, that hangs, I
think, close by the master's picture in the long Italian gallery
of the Louvre. I have never met the eyes of the child who
looks from that picture without feeling that here was one who
leant from heaven and saw that men could never understand.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

have been thinking of this time, spent in the
rather magnificent house of the tobacco-merchant,
when, wrapped in Byron's cloak, with Moore's
translation in his pocket, he wrote in the 1831
edition of Romance these lines, that were to be
erased later :

" For, being an idle boy lang syne,
Who read Anacreon and drank wine,
I early found Anacreon rhymes
Were almost passionate sometimes—
And by strange alchemy of brain
His pleasures always turn'd to pain —
His naivete to wild desire—
His wit to love — his wine to fire—
And so, being young and dipt in folly
I fell in love with melancholy,
And used to throw my earthly rest
And quiet all away in jest —
I could not love except where Death
Was mingling his with Beauty's breath—
Or Hymen, Time, and Destiny
Were stalking between her and me."

Byron's cloak was already on his shoulders
when, at the age of seventeen, he began his
session at the University. He earnestly but
discreetly lived up to it, with no very serious
result, as he escaped censure by the authorities,
and took honours in Latin and French. He
had, however, gambled prodigiously, and expected
Mr. Allan to satisfy a debt of honour that

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

amounted to two thousand five hundred dollars.
Mr. Allan was a business man. The cloak of
Byron meant nothing to him, nor did the gains
in Latin and French compensate for these more
obvious losses. He removed Poe from the
University, and set him to add figures in his
office.

Honours in Latin and French, a grand manner in
gambling, a boy's tragical love affair, and the cloak
of Byron, do not find in a tall stool in a tobacco-
merchant's office the setting they require. Poe
knew what the setting should have been, when
he permitted, or even helped into existence the
fictions of his expedition in aid of Grecian
liberty, the journey that did not end in Misso-
longhi but in St. Petersburg.* That is what

* It is worth while to show that Poe was not alone in thus
trying to lessen the discrepancy between his life and what he
felt to be fitting to his character. I take an example from
Hogg's Life of Shelley. Shelley wrote to Godwin :

" ' At the period to which I allude, I was at Eton. No
sooner had I formed the principles [Godwin's own] which I
now profess, than I was anxious to disseminate their benefits.
This was done without the slightest caution. I was twice
expelled, but recalled by the interference of my father.'

"All this is pu rely imaginary : he never published anything
controversial at Eton ; he was never expelled ; not twice, not
once. His poetic temperament was overpowered by the
grandeur and awfulness of the occasion^ when he took up his

17 B

EDGAR ALLAN POE

the setting should have been. But it was not.
Professor Woodberry prints documents that leave
little possible doubt as to what actually occurred.
Poe left Mr. Allan, went to Boston, and persuaded
another boy, who was setting up as a printer, to
publish a book of verse. Then, since there seemed
to be nothing else to do, and he had no money,
he enlisted in the American army under the
name of Edgar A. Perry.

pen to address the author of Caleb Williams, so that the
auspicious Apollo, to relieve and support his favourite son,
shed over his head a benign vision. He saw himself at his
Dame's with Political Justice, which he had lately borrowed
from Dr. Lind, open before him. He had read a few pages
and had formed his principles in a moment ; he was thrown
into a rapture by the truisms, mares' -nests, and paradoxes,
which he had met with.

" He sees himself in the printing-loft of ' J. Pote, bibliopola
et typographus/ amongst Eton grammars and Eton school-
books, republishing with the rapidity of a dream and ' with
out the slightest caution,' Godwin's heavy and unsaleable
volumes. He sees himself before the Dons convened and
expelled ; and lastly, he beholds the Honourable Member for
Shoreham weeping at his knees like Priam at the feet of
Achilles, and imploring the less inexorable Dr. Keate.

"All this being poetically true, he firmly and loyally believes,
and communicates, as being true in act, fact, and deed, to his
venerable correspondent. One more instance, and that is
still more extraordinary ; he says :

" ' My father wished to induce me, by poverty, to accept ol
some commission in a distant regiment, in the interim of my
absence to prosecute the pamphlet, that a process of outlawry
might make the estate on his death devolve to my younger
brother.'

ft No offer of a commission in the army was ever made to
Bysshe ; it is only in a dream, that the prosecution, outlawry,
and devolution of the estate could find a place."

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

The poems received no more attention than is
usually given to unadvertised verse, even of better
quality. Lack of money is enough to account
for many enlistments. But what is extraordinary
is the fact that Byron's cloak, turned to a military
great-coat, brought with it such an attention to
duty and discipline as won Poe, in less than two
years, the responsibilities of a Sergeant-Major.
Perhaps Poe's aloofness from the interests of his
comrades saved him from the carousals, however
mild, that would have overturned his resolves and
certainly cost him his promotion. Drinking alone
is dull work, and there is no evidence that Poe
enjoyed or practised it. There can be no doubt
that he recognised his danger, in the mind of any
one who reads the three letters of recommendation
given him by his officers. The first, from his
lieutenant, says, " His habits are good and intirely
free from drinking "; the second, from his adjutant,
says that he " has been exemplary in his deport
ment"; the third, from his commander, says,
awkwardly, "he appears to be free from bad
habits, in fact the testimony of Lt. Howard,
and Adjt. Griswold is full to that point." It is
not extravagant to suppose that he had asked for
an explicit statement on a question that may have
been raised by Mr. Allan at the close of his short
University career.

He asked for these letters when he had made

EDGAR ALLAN POE

peace with Mr. Allan, who secured for him a
discharge by substitute, so that he might qualify
for officer's rank by passing through the military
school at West Point. Mr. Allan gave him a
rather unpleasant letter, hostile and cold, to the
Secretary for War, and Poe went with it to
Washington.

Some time passed before he was admitted as a
cadet, and he showed that his two years in the
ranks had not altered his character. He had
added other poems to those in his first volume,
and presently published another book, a revised
edition of the first, with the new work. This
book was issued at Baltimore in 1829, and much
of its matter stands in the final edition of his
writings.

On July 1, 1830, he entered West Point. He
was again in the society of students, but the
difference between himself and them was wider
even than that between the young poet-lover and
his fellows at the Virginia University. There, at
least, they were of his own age, although they
had not mourned a Lenore among the tomb
stones. Here, with a man's experience behind
him, he found himself among boys. He had
known something of the sober battles of the
world, whereas they were gaily learning to direct
the gaudy conflicts of the tented field. They said
" he had procured a cadet's appointment for his

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

son, and, the boy having died, the father had
substituted himself in his place." * The loneliness
that lasted through his life was already deepening
about him, but did not prevent him from sharing
in the brandy-drinking that was the habit of the
cadets who shared his room. He met them on
the lowest of common grounds. Elsewhere, he
lived his own life, reading, and writing poetry
that began to wear the iridescent colours of his
genius, doing well in the French and mathematical
classes, but occasionally contemptuously neglect
ful of the military routine. He found it easier
to please the army mind as a penniless common
soldier than as a cadet with a tobacco-merchant
behind him. Six months were sufficient to show
him that he was not destined; to his grandfather's
career, and, to make sure of escaping from West
Point, he compelled his own dismissal by a con
sistent series of offences against the discipline of
the place. ( He was dismissed by court-martial,
and, on March 7, 1831, at the age of twenty-two,
he found himself in the world again, with twelve
cents of his own money, and possibly a few
subscriptions for the new volume of poetry which
he immediately published in New York. On
leaving his guardian, on leaving the ranks, on
leaving West Point, he had flung out his flag in
publishing a book.

* Woodberry. Quoted from Harper s Magazine, 1867.
21

EDGAR ALLAN FOE

The next six years hold the motif of the
troubled composition of his life. In them were
developed the qualities that should have brought
him happiness, and those that turned his happi
ness to misery, those that should have made him
worldlily successful, and those that invariably
turned his success to failure. He was twenty -two
when he left West Point, leaving with it a career
and any hopes he may have had of pecuniary help
from Mr. Allan. For a moment he seems to have
found it hard to realise that money is a thing
that must be earned. He published his book of
poetry, and went to Baltimore because he had
relations there. They did not put him in the
way of getting any work. He tried for a post
as a clerk, and for another as a schoolmaster.
He must have had a full experience of the poverty
of those who can only earn money by their pens,
and have not yet proved their power of doing as
much. In 1833 he was without a decent suit of
clothes, and almost without food. His only pro
perty seems to have been his poems and his first
stories, none of which he had been able to pub
lish. A local paper offered a hundred dollars as
the prize for a competition in story-writing, and
fifty dollars for a similar competition in poetry.

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

Poe, empty-bellied and almost in rags, sent in
The Coliseum and a careful manuscript copy of
his tales in a small book. He won both prizes,
was given the larger, and complimented by the
critics who had decided the awards. The prize
brought him more than the hundred dollars in
the friendship of Mr. Kennedy, who saw to it
that his tales were published in the paper that
had held the competition, gave him a horse to
ride for exercise, fed him and clothed him, and,
in fact, lifted him from the risk of imminent
disaster to a position where he could work with
some tranquillity. Poe also became intimate with
the editor of the paper, an editor who, unfor
tunately, was soon to taste poverty himself.

About this time he became the third in a
small family, thenceforward made up of his aunt,
Mrs. Clemm, her daughter Virginia, then eleven,
and himself. Mrs. Clemm, harder in appearance
than in heart, treated him as her own son, better,
indeed, than mothers treat their sons, starving
herself for his sake, and, to the end of her life,
working unstintedly for his work and for himself.
Poe repaid her by an absolute identification of
her interests with his own, and by an affection
that, next to his feeling for Virginia, was the
least angular thing in his life.

Mr. Allan died next year, and Poe's name was
not in his will. His feelings towards his adopted

EDGAR ALLAN POE

son had already been made sufficiently clear.
The news in no way interrupted Poe's life. He
was working steadily at poetry and prose, and
making money to boil the common pot by scantily
paid journalism. Already his brain was full of
schemes for a paper of his own, a dream like
Balzac's printing house, that was to make him
rich and help him in getting the ear of America
for his work. It is difficult for us, with our
knowledge of what he was to become, to con
struct a true picture of Poe as he seemed then.
But a letter from his friend Mr. Kennedy to the
editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, to
which Poe had just sent his first contribution,
shows us a young man in whom it was easy to
be interested, the sort of young man whom his
elders regard with some fondness, even while
trying to make him like themselves. The letter
is printed in Griswold's essay.

" BALTIMORE, April 13, 1835.

" DEAR SIR,

" Poe did right in referring to me. He is
very clever with his pen — classical and scholar-
like. He wants experience and direction, but I
have no doubt he can be made very useful to
you. And, poor fellow ! he is very poor. I told
him to write something for every number of your
magazine, and that you might find it to your
advantage to give him some permanent employ.

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

He has a volume of very bizarre tales in the
hands of- — , in Philadelphia, who for a year
past has been promising to publish them. This
young fellow is highly imaginative, and a little
given to the terrific. He is at work upon a
tragedy, but I have turned him to drudging
upon whatever may make money, and 1 have no
doubt you and he will find your account in each
other."

Poe, though " classical and scholar-like," and
" a little given to the terrific," very soon made it
clear that if he had had a magazine of his own
he would have known what to do with it. He
first contributed to the Southern Literary Mes
senger in 1835. At midsummer he left Baltimore
for Richmond, to become more closely connected
with it. In January of the next year he was
practically managing it, and filling its columns
with his work. By January 1837 he had turned
a little paper, that was rather tottery upon its
legs, into a firmly established and important
magazine. His critical articles, of a kind new
in America, iconoclastic, vigorous, and speedily
feared, had brought it to the level of the older
papers of New York. He then left it to its
success, and turned to face poverty himself.

The history of his connection with the Mes
senger runs parallel to events in his private life,
equally important to us in their elucidation of

EDGAR ALLAN POE

his character. The child Virginia had become
necessary to him, and his cousin's proposal to
take care of her until she should be old enough
to decide if she and Foe were suited to each
other, first threw him into extreme anguish, and
then, rousing him to action, hurried on a wedding.
He took out a licence in September 1835. It is
suggested that there was a private marriage.
Whether that is so or not, Virginia did not leave
Mrs. Clemm, and mother and daughter followed
Poe to Richmond. Here he tried to establish
Mrs. Clemm as the landlady of a boarding house,
in which he and her daughter were to live with
other paying guests. In May 1836 Poe and
Virginia were publicly married. She was not
fourteen.

It is probable that early in these six years the
little cloud, at first no bigger than a man's hand,
that was at last to cover the sky and close like a
pall over his grave, had shown on Poe's horizon.
His biographers, Hostile or apologetic, assuming,
like Moslems, that drink is the unforgivable sin,
spend themselves in vain battle, on the one hand,
to show that he was a drunkard, on the other, to
prove that he touched little but water. There
is, certainly, no evidence to show that, before
leaving West Point, Poe had been in the habit
of drinking more than other young men. But,
when we remember the circumstances of his

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

childhood, the Hogarth picture of the old woman
feeding the child with gin, and his father's un
doubted failing, we find it easy to explain much
of his story by supposing that, in those early
months of starvation, Foe, like most men in
sufficiently fed, took more readily to drink than
to food, and found it less difficult to obtain.;
Drink is always offered before food to a starving
man by his friends. Poe may have learnt in a
tavern in Baltimore, like many a young journalist
in a bar in Fleet Street, that a glass of whisky is
almost the only thing that is given and taken
without a hint of the patronage distasteful alike
to giver and receiver. He certainly learnt to
fear it. Griswold prints a letter from White,
the owner of the Messenger, in which occur these
sentences :

" That you are sincere in all your promises I
firmly believe. But when you once again tread
these streets, I have my fears that your resolution
will fail and that you will again drink until your
senses are lost. ... If you would make your
self contented with quarters in my house, or with
any other private family where liquor is not used,
I should think there was some hope for you.
But if you go to a tavern or to any other place
where it is used at table, you are not safe."

Is it too much to suppose that something
more than his knowledge of Virginia's age made

EDGAR ALLAN POE

Neilson Poe anxious fo remove her from his
cousin's side ? Is it too much to find in the
separation from the Messenger a proof that
renewed lapses contributed to Poe's irregularity
at the office: Nothing else explains at once the
dismissal of so successful an editor and the
friendly attitude of White, who was still ready
to publish his work.

In the six years since he left West Point Poe
had fought his way up from poverty, and shown
that, with Balzac's business powers and acumen,
he had also, for different reasons, Balzac's ill luck
in letting other people profit by them. He had
found himself, and, with himself, the secret of
his eventual disaster.

VII

Poe's life henceforth is a story of shiftings
from the pillar to the post of journalism. In
1838 he published The Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym, that had begun as a serial contribu
tion to the Messenger. In 1839 he put his name
to a piece of hackwork, not much more predatory
than the exercises of other free lances, that was
published under the name of The Conchologisfs
First Book ; or, A System of Testaceous Mala
cology. He contributed to many American
papers, and became particularly connected with

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

Burtons Gentleman s Magazine and American
Monthly Review, where he reprinted much that
had already appeared, and published The Journal
of Julius Rodman and a quantity of criticism.
But, in June 1840, he had a vehement quarrel
with Burton. Burton was an actor and the
proprietor of the paper. Foe considered him a
scoundrel on account of a premium scheme, and
also, perhaps chiefly, because he wished to mollify
the tone of Poe's attacks on some of the authors
he criticised. Poe seems to have written a bitter
letter, meeting Burton on his own ground, and
suggesting that slashing reviews brought sub
scribers to the paper. The editor replied in a
letter quoted by Griswold :

" I am sorry you have thought it necessary to
send me such a letter. Your troubles have given
a morbid tone to your feelings which it is your
duty to discourage. I myself have been as
severely handled by the world as you could
possibly have been, but my sufferings have not
tinged my mind with melancholy, nor jaundiced
my views of society. You must rouse your
energies, and if care assail you, conquer it. I
will gladly overlook the past. I hope you will
as easily fulfil your pledges for the future. We
shall agree very well, though I cannot permit
the magazine to be made a vehicle for that sort
of severity which you think is * so successful
with the mob.' I am truly much less anxious

EDGAR ALLAN POE

about making a monthly ' sensation ' than I am
upon the point of fairness. You must, my dear
sir, get rid of your avowed ill feelings towards
your brother authors. You see I speak plainly :
I cannot do otherwise upon such a subject.
You say the people love havoc. I think they
love justice. I think you yourself would not
have written the article on Dawes in a more
healthy state of mind. I am not trammelled by
any vulgar considerations of expediency ; I
would rather lose money than, by such undue
severity, wound the feelings of a kind-hearted
and honourable man ; and I am satisfied that
Dawes has something of the true fire in him. I
regretted your word-catching spirit. But 1
wander from my design. I accept your proposi
tion to recommence your interrupted avocations
upon the Maga. Let us meet as if we had not
exchanged letters. Use more exercise, write
when feelings prompt, and be assured of my
friendship. You will soon regain a healthy
activity of mind and laugh at your past
vagaries."

I am almost^ inclined to suspect that Mr.
Burton wrote his letter with a view to publica
tion, or, at least, to showing it round among
his friends. Its sentiments are so uniformly
respectable. Few things are more galling to
proud and sensitive minds than to receive advice
of this confident nature from their intellectual
inferiors. " I am satisfied that Dawes has some-

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

thing of the true fire in him." Pronouncements
like that stir the mildest heart when they come
from the mouths of publishers and men of
business with more pretension than right to
literary judgment. Poe must indeed have been
in straits to consent to work with such a man.

Burton also accused Poe of drunkenness, a
charge that was indignantly denied. Presently
Burton was trying to sell his magazine, and Poe
was trying to start another that should be his
own, and leave him free from interference. He
failed in securing a capitalist, and became editor
of Grahams Magazine, to which he contributed
his articles on cryptography and handwriting,
and, amongst other stories, The Murders in the
Rue Morgue.

Meanwhile, he was living a peaceful idyll with
Virginia and the gigantic, matronly Mrs. Clemm,
who was body-servant and mother to them both.
But Virginia broke a blood-vessel in singing, and
spent the, rest of her life in dying. This anxiety
possibly increased Poe's irregularities, which had,
however, other causes. He had lived beyond his
means.

" There are few men of that peculiar sensibility
which is at the root of genius, who, in early
youth, have not expended much of their mental
energy in living too fast ; and, in later years,
comes the unconquerable desire to goad the

EDGAR ALLAN POE

imagination up to that point which it would
have attained in an ordinary, normal, or well-
regulated life. The earnest longing for artificial
excitement, which, unhappily, has characterised
too many eminent men, may thus be regarded as
a psychal want, or necessity — an effort to regain
the lost — a struggle of the soul to assume the
position which, under other circumstances, would
have been its due."

It is suggested that he took opium. In 1842,
he left Graham's Magazine less peaceably than
he had parted from the Messenger. He again
projected a paper of his own, but, going to
Washington to seek subscribers for it, he became
intoxicated to such an extent that his friends
sent for each other, and debated who was to
take him home, lest harm should come to him
on the way.

On June 11, 1843, he wrote to Griswold a
letter that shows into what state of poverty the
family had fallen :

"DEAR GRISWOLD, — Can you send me five
dollars ? 1 am sick and Virginia almost gone.
Come and see me. Peterson says you suspect
me of a curious anonymous letter. I did not
write it, but bring it with you when you make
the visit you promised to Mrs. Clemm. I will
try to fix that matter soon. Could you do any
thing with my note ? Yours truly,

" E. A. P."

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

Virginia did not die until 1847. But year by
year she lingered as if in the moment of depar
ture. Few things are more trying to the nerves
than a protracted farewell ; and, when the parting

is for ever ! It is not surprising that Poe's

tendency found slight resistance to its growth
during these years.

Griswold describes his home in Philadelphia :

" When once he sent for me to visit him,
during a period of illness caused by protracted
and anxious watching at the side of his sick wife,
I was impressed by the singular neatness and the
air of refinement in his home. It was in a small
house, in one of the pleasant and silent neigh
bourhoods far from the centre of the town, and
though slightly and cheaply furnished, every
thing in it was so tasteful and fitly disposed that
it seemed altogether suitable for a man of genius.
For this and for most of the comforts he enjoyed,
in his brightest as in his darkest years, he was
chiefly indebted to his mother-in-law, who loved
him with more than maternal devotion and
constancy."

During the summer of 1843, he began lectur
ing with a fierce attack on Griswold's Poets and
Poetry of America. He is not likely to have
lectured without thinking of the art of oratory,
and discovering laws to which he did his best to
adhere. But we can guess at the character of
his delivery from the various notes that have

33 c

EDGAR ALLAN POE

been left describing his manner of conversation.
Mrs. Osgood, for example, speaks of his "pure
and almost celestial eloquence." Griswold de
scribed it as supra-mortal. " His voice was
modulated with astonishing skill, and his large
and variably expressive eyes looked repose or
shot fiery tumult into those who listened, while
his own face glowed, or was changeless in pallor,
as his imagination quickened his blood or drew
it back frozen to his heart." Mrs. Whitman
noticed that "the strange fascination — the un
matched charm of his conversation — consisted in
its genuineness." We are to imagine a less
rotund Coleridge, who meant what he said, and
seemed, as he said it, to mean it perhaps more
vehemently than he did. We are to imagine
this man leaving his extreme poverty and his
slowly dying wife, and lecturing on poetry to
well-fed and comfortable audiences.

VIII

Poe returned to Grahams Magazine as a con
tributor, and seems to have recovered a semi
official position on the paper. But he was soon
again projecting a paper of his own, that was to
be a kind of co-operative Edinburgh Review,
with an editor to be chosen by election.

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

Throughout his life as a journalist runs this
continuous thread of hope that he would one
day control a paper, and build up such a power
ful weapon of criticism as Christopher North had
fashioned in Blackwoods.

In 1844, when Grahams deserted him, he
went, almost penniless, to New York. He took
Virginia with him, and Mrs. Clemm followed.
For some time they lived on his earnings as a
free lance, and starved, because the rates of pay
were small, and he could not publish enough
work to overcome this handicap in his struggle
for bread and butter. Then, for a time, he was
a minor assistant on another man's paper, where
he bore his humiliating position with a good
grace, and won the rather patronising praise of
his editor. In January, 1845, he published The
Raven in this paper, The Evening Mirror, and
it was reprinted in The American Whig Review,
This raised his value as a contributor, in giving
him a wider celebrity than he had won from his
tales and criticisms. He left The Evening
Mirror, and opened another of his adventures
as an editor. He joined The Broadway Journal
which had just come into existence, and, as with
the Messenger, speedily became its chief contri
butor, and finally its motive power. The tenth
number of the Journal announces as editors
C. F. Briggs, Edgar A. Poe, and H. C. Watson.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

The first number of the second volume is " edited
by Edgar A. Poe and Henry C. Watson." The
sixteenth number of the second volume announces
" Edgar A. Poe, Editor and Proprietor," and the
twenty- sixth number, January 3, 1846, contains
this note :

" VALEDICTORY.

"UNEXPECTED engagements demanding my
whole attention, and the objects being fulfilled,
so far as regards myself personally, for which
The Broadway Journal was established, I now,
as its editor, bid farewell — as cordially to foes as
to friends.

" Mr. Thomas H. Lowe is authorized to
collect all money due the Journal.

" EDGAR A. POE."

The Broadway Journal had come to an end.
Poe had acquired it in exchange for a promis
sory note which Horace Greeley endorsed and
had to meet. Poe borrowed from Griswold to
pay his printers. He succeeded in raising the
circulation, but a few borrowed dollars will not
run a paper, and the paper died as proudly as it
might.

In New York he came to know some literary
ladies, who were to take a strange part in the
latter years of his life. One of them, Mrs.
Osgood, whose poetry he admired, wrote, when
he was dead, a description of him which, though

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

it betrays her own character more clearly than
his, is yet worth reading as a sidelight upon the
colour of his existence :

" It was in his own simple yet poetical home
that to me the character of Edgar Foe appeared
in its most beautiful light. Playful, affectionate,
witty, alternately docile and wayward as a petted
child, for his young, gentle, and idolised wife,
and for all who came, he had, even in the midst
of his most harassing literary duties, a kind word,
a pleasant smile, a graceful and courteous atten
tion. At his desk beneath the romantic picture
of his loved and lost Lenore, he would sit, hour
after hour, patient, assiduous, and uncomplain
ing, tracing, in an exquisitely clear chirography,
and with almost superhuman swiftness, the light
ning thoughts — the ' rare and radiant fancies '
—as they flashed through his wonderful and
ever-wakeful brain. I recollect one morning,
toward the close of his residence in this city,
when he seemed unusually gay and light-hearted.
Virginia, his sweet wife, had written me a press
ing invitation to come to them ; and I, who
never could resist her affectionate summons, and
who enjoyed his society far more in his own
home than elsewhere, hastened to Amity Street.
I found him just completing his series of papers
entitled The Literati of New York. 'See,'
said he, displaying in laughing triumph several
little rolls of narrow paper (he always wrote thus
for the press), ' I am going to show you by the
difference of length in these the different degrees

EDGAR ALLAN POE

of estimation in which I hold all you literary
people. In each of these one of you is rolled up
and fully discussed. Come, Virginia, help me ! '
And one by one they unfolded them. At last
they came to one which seemed interminable.
Virginia laughingly ran to one corner of the
room with one end, and her husband to the
opposite with the other. 'And whose length
ened sweetness long drawn out is that ? ' said I.
' Hear her ! ' he cried. ' Just as if her little
vain heart didn't tell her it's herself ! '

Poe found in the friendship of women a stimu
lant that took in the end as powerful a hold on
him as drink. His wife did not satisfy his
needs of intellectual courtship, and she even
asked Mrs. Osgood to allow and to suffer her
husband's letters. Mrs. Osgood may not have
loved Poe, but she describes "his proud and
beautiful head erect, his dark eyes flashing with
the electric light of feeling and of thought,"
and says that "to a sensitive and delicately
nurtured woman, there was a peculiar and irre
sistible charm in the chivalric, graceful, and
almost tender reverence with which he invari
ably approached all women who won his respect."
She retained her feeling for him till she died,
though, at the end of the first year of their
acquaintanceship, busybodies had made their
meetings impossible.

During that year he moved out of New York

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

to the little cottage at Fordham which has
usurped the pretensions of all his other resting-
places, and come to represent Poe's home life.
He only lived there during the last two and a
half years of his forty. Mrs. Whitman, who in
the last act of his life became an important
person of the drama, described it as "a little
Dutch cottage . . . bordered by a flower
garden, whose clumps of rare dahlias and
brilliant beds of fall flowers showed, in the
careful culture bestowed upon them, the fine
floral taste of the inmates." The cottage was
half buried in fruit trees. Mrs. Clemm, as
always, did the work, and the three of them
must there have had some happiness from their
lives. They had pets, a bobolink and a parrot,
arid a cat that used to sit on Poe's shoulder as
he wrote.

But they became so poor that a public appeal
was made for them, which Poe was too proud to
allow without protest. Friends cared for them,
fed them, and nursed the now rapidly sinking
Virginia. She died on January 30, 1847, at the
age of twenty-four. Poe was worn out by priva
tion and anxiety, and fell seriously ill.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

He slowly recovered, and spent the remainder
of the year in thinking out and writing Eureka.
He published Ulalume in December. His
Murders in the Rue Morgue had been stolen by
more than one French paper, and the first French
criticism upon him had appeared in the Revue
des Deux Mondes. Baudelaire was about to
devote the better part of his life to the exposition
of his doctrines and the translation of his work.
But Poe could not know this, and the loneliness
that followed him to his death began to be
oppressive. He was, however, again full of the
hope of founding a magazine. On January 22,
1840, he wrote to Willis :

" MY DEAR MR. WILLIS, — I am about to make
an effort at re-establishing myself in the literary
world, and feel that I may depend upon your aid.

" My general aim is to start a Magazine, to be
called The Stylus, but it would be useless to me,
even when established, if not entirely out of the
control of a publisher. I mean, therefore, to get
up a Journal which shall be my own, at all points.
With this end in view, I must get a list of, at
least, five hundred subscribers to begin with : —
nearly two hundred I have already. I propose,
however, to go South and West, among my
personal and literary friends — old college and

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

West Point acquaintances — and see what I can
do. In order to get the means of taking the first
step, I propose to lecture at the Society Library,
on Thursday the 3d of February — and that there
may be no cause of squabbling, my subject shall
not be literary at all. I have chosen a broad text
-< The Universe.'

" Having thus given you the facts of the case, I
leave all the rest to the suggestion of your own tact
and generosity. Gratefully — most gratefully—
" Your friend always,

"EDGAR A. POE."

The lecture was an abridged version of Eureka.
It did not bring him the money for which he had
hoped. He repeated elsewhere his lecture on
The Poetic Principle. But The Stylus was never
to appear.

I have already spoken of his friendships for
women, encouraged, in the case of Mrs. Osgood,
by his wrife. After her death, his need of feminine
companionship became a disease. He could not
do without it. This was no physical m^d, nor
even " falling in love." It had two motives.

He could not be satisfied with the motherly and
man-servant-like attention of Mrs. Clemm, but
felt an imperious need of marriage, of being
married, of being re-established in life on a firm
basis, as he hoped with his paper to re-establish
himself in literary America. A wife became a
thing as full of beckoning promise to him as

EDGAR ALLAN POE

The Stylus. He sought both with equal abandon.
Beside this new motive was another. He had
loved Virginia, but, even while she was alive, had
sought to live other poems with other women.
They were harmless little German poems, of
holding hands, and walks in the dusk, and
meetings of mystery-laden eyes. They were part
of his life, and we are now given the dishearten
ing spectacle of Poe making love to two or three
middle-aged women at once, and oscillating in his
mind between several prospects of married life
under the care of different guardian angels of lite
rary tastes. No more brain- wrecking condition
can be imagined, and its harassments were not
lessened by his other and more physical disease.

Within a year of his death he had written to
Mrs. Whitman :

" The agonies which I have lately endured have
passed my soul through fire. Henceforth I am
strong. This those who love me shall know as
well as those who have so relentlessly sought to
ruin me. ... I have absolutely no pleasure in
the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly
indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of
pleasure that I have perilled life and reputation
and reason. It has been in the desperate attempt
to escape from torturing memories — memories
of wrong and injustice and imputed dishonour—
from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a
dread of some strange impending doom."

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

But the two diseases reacted on each other,
and soon frenzied wooings alternated with bouts
of drinking. He was also taking laudanum.
Now one marriage was arranged and now another.
It is surprising that he still wrote. During 1849,
he lectured again on The Poetic Principle, and
made renewed efforts to secure money for The
Stylus. He more than once had serious warn
ings of t]ie rapid approach of his end. He had,
however, at Richmond a St. Martin's summer of
happiness with some friends. He prepared to
settle at Richmond, but, on a journey to New
York, stopped at Baltimore and drank enough
to make further travelling impossible. The
elections were being fought, and canvassers find
ing him already drunk, kept him so, and dragged
him about from place to place to record his vote for
their candidate. On October 3, he was recognised
and taken to the hospital in delirium tremens.
The manner of his death suggests that of Bamp-
fylde, described in one of Southey's letters.
After a bountiful youth of open air and poetry,
he had come to town, and found his way into a
madhouse, only recovering his reason and freedom
to die of a consumption. The doctor urged him
to go to Devonshire, saying his friends would be
glad to see him. " He hid his face and answered,
' No, sir ; they who saw me what I was, shall
never see me what I am.' ' Just so died Poe, on

EDGAR ALLAN FOE

October 7, 1849. The resident physician at the
hospital told him he hoped " that in a few days
he would be able to enjoy the society of his
friends. ... At this he broke out with much
energy, and said the best thing his best friend
could do would be to blow out his brains with a
pistol."* He became delirious again, and then,
at three o'clock of a Sunday morning grew quiet,
and died, saying "Lord help my poor soul."

* Letter from Dr. Moran to Mrs. Clemm. Woodberry.

A PRELIMINARY NOTE ON
POE'S CRITICISM

THERE is a stridency in Poe's critical writings
that we do not find elsewhere. Even the rude
essays of the old Blackwood and Quarterly
reviewers sound a fuller note, a rounder tone.
And, among men on Poe's level, Hazlitt argues,
i Leigh Hunt recites, and Lamb insinuates, all
with a tenderer regard for listeners' ears. These
are English critics, but Lowell, with whom, as
an American, it is fairer to compare Poe, " roars
you as gently as any sucking dove." I call
! Lowell an American, but the distinction between
them, to which is due Poe's stridency and
Lowell's mildness is this : Lowell, from his
\ study window, compliments his readers with the
I assumption that they are of the Old World or
| as good in the same way ; Poe lectures frankly
j from an American tub to an audience of
j Americans, and, his subject being what it is,
j far from their common interests, it is not sur
prising that he has to shout to make his speeches
heard.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

English criticism had influenced Poe's youth.
Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, that hetero
geneous, mazelike work, in whose blind alleys
and unfinished roads there is more than in any
other English book of searching km»ledge of
the processes and ends of composition, shaped
Poe's conception of the object of writing, and
started him on his quest of an aesthetic theory.
In the Letter to B , with which he pre
faced an early edition of his poems, he adopts,
knowingly or unknowingly it is irrelevant to
discuss, Coleridge's words.

Coleridge writes : " A poem is that species of
composition, which is opposed to works of science,
by proposing for its immediate object pleasure,
not truth. . . ."

Poe : " A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a
work of science by having, for its immediate
object, pleasure, not truth. . . . '

The phrase " in my opinion " being true,
justifies him, I suppose, in using the words of
the man by whom the opinion had been formed.
Coleridge walks like a ghost through much of
Poe's criticism, although their understandings of
a critic's duties were directly opposite. England
and America needed differently built reviewers. *

" He who tells me," writes Coleridge, " that
there are defects in a new work, tells me nothing

PRELIMINARY NOTE

which I should not have taken for granted with
out his information. But he who points out
and elucidates the beauties of an original work
does indeed give me interesting information, such
as experience would not have authorised me in
anticipating."

Coleridge's reviewer was such a man as Leigh
Hunt, whose scattered italics bring his voice to
us across the garden where he reads, or, through a
subtler development of the same spirit, such a
man as Pater, in whose company our eyes are
awakened to the tinted mist that rises from the
flowers — the mist that perhaps we had not before
been able to perceive. Such a critic was, some
times, that old Greek pedagogue of whom Pope
wrote :

" See Dionysius Homer's thoughts refine
And call new Beauties forth from ev'ry Line."

His choice of beauties is indeed valuable,
balanced as it is by a wise selection of defects
from other writers. Pater's disentanglements
and drawings-out of loveliness are like Carri£re's
pictures in their leisurely revelation. Leigh
Hunt's turned-down leaves and marked passages
give his criticism the charm of reading aloud.

Poe's criticism is without charm, and he
resembles Dionysius writing of Hegesias more
often than Dionysius quoting Homer or playing

49 D

EDGAR ALLAN POE

showman to Sappho. He had sterner work to
do than Hunt's or Pater's. We have to remem
ber the America in which he wrote. Its criti
cism, when he began to write, was a tumult of
timid flattery and unreasoning praise. America
had so lately ceased to be a colony that the Old
World was still indiscriminately reverenced at the
expense of the New. Its homegrown civilisation
was so fresh that accomplishment, however poor,
was more often admired than judged. American
letters were on the one hand neglected for
European, and on the other uncritically praised
because they were American. Poe was clear in
his denunciation of both these evils.

" You are aware of the great barrier in the ,
path of an American writer. He is read, if at
all, in preference to the combined and estab
lished wit of the world. I say established ; for
it is with literature as with law or empire — an
established name is an estate in tenure, or a
throne in possession. Besides, one might sup
pose that books, like their authors, improve by
travel — their having crossed the sea is, with us,
so great a distinction. Our antiquaries abandon
time for distance ; our very fops glance from the
binding to the bottom of the title-page, where
the mystic characters which spell London, Paris,
or Genoa, are precisely so many letters of recom
mendation."

This complaint holds the grievance of all
50

PRELIMINARY NOTE

young writers, who see the bony fingers of
Shakespeare and Spenser reaching from the
grave to pluck the cloaks of those who, unde-
tained, might read the books just published by
themselves. That is hard, but Americans of
Foe's time suffered a competition more unfair,
A writer who felt himself peer to some at least
of the dead, saw his readers held from him not
only by the classics but by a thousand medio
crities whose foreign birth alone gave them the
word before him.

Poe complained of this handicap but did not
spare the faults he saw at home. He would
have no petting of his countrymen.

" It is folly to assert, as some at present are
fond of asserting, that the literature of any
nation or age was ever injured by plain speak
ing on the part of the critics. As for American
letters, plain speaking about them is, simply, the
one thing needed. They are in a condition of
absolute quagmire — a quagmire, to use the
words of Victor Hugo, ' doii on ne pent se tirer
par des periphrases — par des quemadmodums et
des verumenimveros.9 '

American criticism had not the dignity that
could raise the standard of American judgment,
being fully occupied in unlimited praise of the
foreigner and hurried praise of its friends, com-

EDGAR ALLAN POE

paring them one by one to the models it un-
questioningly imported.

" When we attend less to * authority,' " wrote
Poe, " and more to principles, when we look less
at merit and more at demerit (instead of the
converse, as some persons suggest), we shall
then be better critics than we are. We must
neglect our models and study our capabilities.
The mad eulogies, on what occasionally has, in
letters, been well done, spring from our imperfect
comprehension of what it is possible for us to do
better. ' A man who has never seen the sun,'
says Calderon, ' cannot be blamed for thinking
that no glory can exceed that of the moon ; a
man who has seen neither moon nor sun cannot
be blamed for expatiating on the incomparable
effulgence of the morning star.' Now it is the
business of the critic so to soar that he shall see
the sun, even although its orb be far below the
ordinary horizon."

In America were many morning stars who
had not their friends to thank if they did not
mistake themselves for suns. According to the
newspapers, whose short-sighted eyes are always
easily dazzled, the sky was ablaze with light. It
was impossible to look " full in the face of the
blue firmament," so thickly clustered and so
radiant were the false centres of the solar
system. A Poe was indeed needed who could
sight the true orb, and, having seen it, put out

PRELIMINARY NOTE

the lesser lights. He stated accordingly a
principle of criticism the exact opposite of
Coleridge's, and, in putting it upon a philoso
phical basis, the practical reason for it not
sufficing him, came upon an important link in
the chain of his aesthetic theory.

"Boccalini, in his Advertisements from
Parnassus, tells us that a critic once presented
Apollo with a severe censure upon an excellent
poem. The god asked him for the beauties of
the work. He replied that he only troubled
himself about the errors. Apollo presented him
with a sack of unwinnowed wheat, and bade him
pick out all the chaff for his pains. Now we
have not fully made up our minds that the god
was in the right. We are not sure that the limit
of critical duty is not very generally misappre
hended. Excellence may be considered an
axiom, or a proposition which becomes self-
evident just in proportion to the clearness or
precision with which it is put. If it fairly exists,
in this sense, it requires no further elucidation.
It is not excellence if it need to be demonstrated
as such. To point out too particularly the
beauties of a work is to admit, tacitly, that these
beauties are not wholly admirable. Regarding
then excellence as that which is capable of self-
manifestation, it but remains for the critic to
show when, where, and how it fails in becoming
manifest; and, in this showing, it will be the
fault of the book itself if what of beauty it
contains be not, at least, placed in the fairest

EDGAR ALLAN POE

light. In a word, we may assume, notwith
standing a vast deal of pitiable cant upon this
topic, that in pointing out frankly the errors of a
work, we do nearly all that is critically necessary
in displaying its merits. In teaching what per
fection is, how, in fact, shall we more rationally
proceed than in specifying what it is not ? "

He approaches here the theory of Benedetto
Croce, a comparison of whose ideas with Poe's
always illumines the unseen object of his
thought. Reading beauty for excellence, which,
after examining our definition of beauty, Poe
would have allowed, we can more clearly under
stand his view.* Beauty, or expression, is self-
evident in so far as it is truly beauty, truly
expression. To demonstrate it as such is only
to repeat it in identical terms, or to say that a
thing that is the same thing is equal to the same
thing ; and this is waste of time. It is more
profitable to note those moments of self-contra
diction, those small mutinies that, quarrelling
with individual beauties, destroy the whole ex
pression. A cultivated sensitiveness to discord
is the same thing as an appreciation of harmony.

These were the reasons, this the principle that
determined the character of Poe's criticism, and
made his articles, even on the poets he admired
— like Mrs. Browning — read like attacks. They

* In another passage he makes the substitution himself.

PRELIMINARY NOTE

are indeed unfair unless we have given the ex
cellences of the books reviewed an opportunity
for self-manifestation. Many critics, rightly
caring that their work should be itself creative
and valuable on its own account, are indifferent
as to whether we have read or seen the books
or pictures that have engendered it. Pater's
Mona Lisa can be enjoyed by those who have
not been to the Louvre to see Leonardo's. A
knowledge of Villon's poetry is not necessary
to a just delight in Stevenson's essay on his
favourite vagabond. But Poe, perhaps unwisely,
paid his readers the compliment of supposing
that they read the books first and his criticisms
afterwards.

Three volumes of his collected works are filled
with judgments upon English and American
literature, and with essays upon his art, uncon
nected with particular books. There is much
here that is worthless, but it is easy to winnow
the grain of his intended criticism from the chaff
of unformed opinion, praise written only for the
day and blame that had not had time to grow
philosophical. There is no need to judge a
man's aim by those occasions on which Forced
Haste, an unfriendly hand, pulls his arm aside at
the moment of loosing the arrow, or sends the
shaft upon its way before his eye is steady on
the target. In thinking of Poe's critical work,

EDGAR ALLAN POE

we think of his Hawthorne, and his Philo
sophy of Composition, and the other essays
whose temper of mind lets them share with
these a swift and dry-shod life.

These essays turn readily from a discussion of
this or that volume to speculation on the prin
ciples of literature. The needs of American
letters are often forgotten for a higher purpose,
and few books of criticism are more valuable to
writers who care worthily for the art they prac
tise. Narrative, plot, inversion, the length of
poems, all the secrets of literature's harmony
and counterpoint, are one after another his
subject. With such a view of criticism as was
his it is not surprising that he does not often
describe his own adventures among masterpieces,
though here and there are vivid fragments of
characterisation. Of Coleridge, for example :

"In reading his poetry, I tremble like one
who stands upon a volcano, conscious from the
very darkness bursting from the crater, of the
fire and light that are weltering below."

Of Macaulay :

" . . . we assent to what he says too often
because we so very clearly understand what it is
that he intends to say. Comprehending vividly
the points and the sequence of his argument, we
fancy that we are concurring in the argument
itself."

PRELIMINARY NOTE

Of Defoe :

" Not one person in ten — nay not one person in
five hundred — has, during the perusal of Robin
son Crusoe, the most remote conception that any
particle of genius, or even of common talent, has
been employed in its creation. Men do not look
upon it in the light of a literary performance.
Defoe has none of their thoughts — Robinson all.
The powers which have wrought the wonder
have been thrust into obscurity by the very
stupendousriess of the wonder they have wrought.
We read and become perfect abstractions in the
intensity of our interest ; we close the book, and
are quite satisfied that we could have written as
well ourselves."

These fragments, which are just and careful, are
certainly balanced by opinions on other writers
with which time has not brought the world to
agree, or kept it in agreement. Poe praised
Moore extravagantly, and also Hood ; but, per
haps because of his dislike of seers and teachers,
could not bring himself to write with courtesy
of Emerson or Carlyle.

It is not by such passages or opinions that his
criticism can be judged. Many theorists astonish
us by the wrongness or rightness of their examples
without in either case affecting the truth of the
argument. And Poe's interest was less in indi
viduals than in the principles and nature of their
art. The De Sublimitate of Longinus might

EDGAR ALLAN POE

be paralleled with a Concerning Beauty made
up entirely of quotations from Poe's critical
work. Indeed this book is, in a humble manner,
such a collection. It is impossible to discuss
Poe's practice without reference to what he has
himself written on his theory. I have placed
this chapter first because it overflows into all the
others. I think it better to consider his views
on the length of a poem while writing of his
poetry, and his ideas on story -telling while writing
of his tales, to take only two examples, than to
crowd these and many other fertile opinions into
an essay either too long for the book or too short
for their illustration. His views on self-conscious
art were in any case too important not to need
a chapter to themselves.

It is sufficient here ta point out that in
these three volumes, strident in pitch, often
exaggerated in tone, sometimes difficult to
read with patience, lie the greater number of his
efforts towards an aesthetic philosophy. As he
worked, so he thought, and observed his work
and that of other men. His skill and observa
tion grew with each other's growth. Building
on the foundation that held excellence to be
itself manifest, Poe raised for himself a structure
of knowledge about the means of avoiding ugli
ness or failure in expression. There is no rule
for the creation of beauty, but there are many

PRELIMINARY NOTE

for freeing loveliness from its fetters. Perseus
cannot make an Andromeda, but he can loose
her from the rock. The varying, hazardous
nature of Poe's conception of beauty will be
come clear to us as we proceed. She appeared
to him in changing veils, now pure and trans
parent, now dimmed and opaque with lesser
heresies, but never beneath a veil so darkening
as that through which she shows to men who
have never troubled to cleanse their eyes or to
ask themselves what indeed they see. No other
goddess has suffered such violence at the hands
of her worshippers, none has been so cheapened
in the mouths of her talkative priests. Poe at
least tried to set her on her throne, and pro
scribed as irreverent those side glances towards
didacticism that bring ruin to so many of those
who should have been her single-minded ser
vants. He did this in the heat of battle ; and,
whenever the smoke cleared about him, he did
more; setting her by herself, and demanding
desperately, from men who did not care, that
her religion should be uncontaminated by ethic,
unblurred by passion, and that the goddess
should be served with the high obedience she
demands, and worshipped with the spiritual
exaltation properly her own.

SELF-CONSCIOUS
TECHNIQUE

THERE is a note, one of a series of Marginalia,
jetsam from old reviews, and new paragraphs too
careful to be unpremeditated, whose light must
not be hidden under the bushel of a general dis
cussion of Poe's criticism. " It is the curse," he
says, "of a certain order of mind, that it can
never rest satisfied with the consciousness of its
ability to do a thing. Not even is it content
with doing it. It must both know and show
how it was done." Now this is the curse that
gave us Leonardo's notebooks, Reynolds' Dis
courses, and Stevenson's essay on Some Tech
nical Elements in Style : the curse that is among
the reasons of Leonardo's excellence, Reynolds'
excellence, Stevenson's excellence and the ex
cellence of Foe himself. . It is the curse that is
at the bottom of all public knowledge of tech
nique. The man who 4s as interested in the way
of doing a thing as in the thing when done, is
the man who is likely to put a new tool into the
hands of his fellow-craftsmen. Such men some-

EDGAR ALLAN POE

times suffer for their curiosity. Poe called it a
curse because he feared it while enjoying it. He
learnt that it is possible for an artist to debauch
in technique as for a lover to take the body for
the soul, and that in one case as in the other it
is the spirit that is lost.

Poe's own methods came gradually to be such
a delight to him ; his interest in them was so
particularised by his essays in criticism and in
the observation of the methods of other men,
that some of his later works have an uncanny
atmosphere about them, as if he had not written
them himself, but had been present, passionately
observant and critical, while they were being
written by some one else. Imagination, from
being a queen, sometimes becomes in them that
slave of the intellect which is called fancy. They
are richly-coloured marionettes that have never
lived, but owe a wire-hung activity to their
maker's cleverness. Poe was too good an ob
server of himself not to notice his -danger. He
must have known that he ran a risk of dying
for Art, as a greater than{ he had died for Life.
It was his destiny, and he pursued it. More
than once he used his pen to make a new thing
out of a discussion of an old one, and on these
occasions he dissects his own motives in so im
personal a manner that it is difficult for the
reader to remember that the author examining

SELF-CONSCIOUS TECHNIQUE

is in any way connected with the author under
going examination. The Haven, for example, a
profound piece of technique, is scarcely as pro
found, and certainly not as surprising, as the
Philosophy of Composition, in which its con
struction is minutely analysed, and Poe callously
explains, as a matter of scientific rather than
personal interest, that the whole poem was built
on the refrain Nevermore, and that this par
ticular refrain was chosen on account of the
sonority and ease of o and r sounded together.
Baudelaire, in calling attention to a poet " qui
pretend que son po&me a ete compose d'apres son
poetique," remarks that " apres tout un peu de
charlatanerie est toujours permis au g^nie, et
meme ne lui messied pas. C'est comme le fard
sur les pommettes d'une femme naturellement
belle, un assaisonnement nouveau pour 1'esprit."
Mountebank or not, Poe was serious in his state
ment. It was not intended as a hoax, but
carried real aspiration into actuality, and noted,
in their extreme manifestation, the workings
possible to such a mind as Poe felt was his own.
In that article he tries to carry a point. Half-
measures are no measures in oratory, and, the
truth being on his side, he might well be per
mitted to say more than the truth in stating it
to an audience. We are concerned here less
with what he says than with the point of view

65 E

EDGAR ALLAN POE

that lets him say it. How different is this way
of talking about writing from the anecdote of
Hoffmann, who held his wife's hand lest, in
terror of the phantasmagoria he created, he
should lose his reason and forget the existence of
a homelier and less delirious world. How dif
ferent from the letters of Balzac, noting joyously
the amount of paper he had daily been able to
cover. How different from the tale of Scott's
tireless hand, or the account of George Sand,
writing with babies on her knees, starting her
characters on their careers, keeping beside them
with fluent pen, and following their adventures
as ignorant as themselves of the end towards
which they were progressing.

Another man, who, like Poe, was at once a
philosopher and deeply interested in technique,
had lived and written, and from him Poe had that
strengthening of his ideas that is given by out
side confirmation. He refers often to William
Godwin, the author of An Enquiry concerning
Political Justice and of several novels, among
them one now most undeservedly half-forgotten,
called Caleb Williams. There is a character
of Godwin in The Spirit of the Age, where
Hazlitt has noted that " his forte is not the
spontaneous but the voluntary exercise of talent,"
a sentence which, if Poe read it, would have been
enough to interest him in its subject. He " re-

SELF-CONSCIOUS TECHNIQUE

minded those who knew him of the Meta
physician engrafted on the Dissenting Minister."
Shelley, who repaid him in the end by running
away with his daughter, wrote him boy's letters
which he answered with chapter and verse on
the conduct of life taken from the Political
Justice. He was a sombre man, and his novel
is a sombre, muscular book, worth reading still
for other reasons besides the anatomy which at
present concerns us. It is seldom possible to
point to any one book as the sign-post of a
literary cross-roads, but there can be no doubt
that in Caleb Williams we can see the begin
nings of self-conscious technique in story-telling.
Hazlitt wrote of it : " No one ever began Caleb
Williams that did not read it through ; no one
that ever read it could possibly forget it, or
speak of it after any length of time, but with an
impression as if the events and feelings had been
personal to himself." And the author had not
only done this, but had known how it was done.
It is usual to say that Poe himself was the first
to talk of choosing an effect and then planning a
tale to produce it. But Caleb Williams was
published in 1794, and, in a preface to one of
the later editions, Godwin gave his methods
away. On him also lay that fruitful curse. He
wrote : rr I formed a conception of a book of f )
fictitious adventure that should in some way be

EDGAR ALLAN POE

distinguished by a very powerful interest. Pur
suing this idea, I invented first the third volume
, ;of my tale, then the second, and last of all the

(tat"

Godwin, perhaps, did not realise how revolu
tionary was his attitude ; and even Hazlitt,
delighted as he was by their results, does not
seem to have noticed the novelty of his methods.
Dickens mentioned them to Poe in writing to
him about his ingenious article on the mechanism
of Barnaby Rudge, and Poe, finding Godwin's
ideas of the very temper of his own, developed
them logically as far as they would go, and, in
two paragraphs that I shall quote, formulated
clearly the principles of self-conscious technique.

But, before reading them, we have to examine
a proposition assumed by the title of this chapter,
and by all that has been written in it. It is easy
to talk about things that have not been defined,
but impossible to talk about them profitably.
We have assumed that there is a well-understood
difference between conception and craftsmanship.
Let us justify the assumption. Until we have
done so we are playing at battledore with a
shuttlecock that does not exist.

We must find for our own satisfaction an
intelligible process for the miracle of beauty's
creation. There is no need to break our heads
on the rash enterprise of proving that there is no

SELF-CONSCIOUS TECHNIQUE

miracle at all. Let us leave that to those who
can believe that a theory of our descent from
protoplasm explains not only our growth but our
original birth. In the making of all beautiful
things, poems, stories, pictures, in the making of
all things that bring us, beside their emotion of
pain or joy or passion, a breath of that ecstasy
that is not of earth and gives us kinship with the
conscious Gods, there is a miracle. The pro
cesses of art of which we are about to speak are
but the reverent preparation of the altar on which
the miracle will be performed, the holy fire will
fall, or the bread be turned to living flesh.
Shelley, in The Defence of Poetry, writes :

" A man cannot say, f I will compose poetry.
The greatest poet even cannot say it ; for the
mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some
invisible influence, like an inconstant wind,
awakens to transitory brightness; this power
arises from within, like the colour of a flower
which fades and changes as it is developed, and
the conscious portions of our natures are un-
prophetic either of its approach or its departure.
Could this influence be durable in its original
purity and force, it is impossible to predict the
greatness of the results ; but when composition
begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and
the most glorious poetry that has ever been
communicated to the world is probably a feeble
shadow of the original conception of the poet. I
appeal to the greatest poets of the present day,

EDGAR ALLAN POE

whether it is not an error to assert that the finest
passages of poetry are produced by labour and
study. The toil and delay recommended by critics,
can be justly interpreted to mean no more than
a careful observation of the inspired moments,
and an artificial connexion of the spaces between
their suggestions by the intertexture of conven
tional expressions ; a necessity only imposed by
the limitedness of the poetical faculty itself, for
Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a whole
before he executed it in portions."

This passage, true in spirit as it is, is carried
away from truth by reason of its parti pris. It
contains the truth glossed into untruth in a few
important sentences by the choice of words which
imply rather than openly state an incorrect appre
ciation of the processes under discussion. The
use of the word conventional, when Shelley talks
of the "artificial connexion" of the spaces between
the suggestions of the "inspired moments," is
enough to throw the reader off the scent, or
rather to let him mistake the true trail for a
herring drag, and therefore to desist at the most
promising moment of his pursuit.

I am not unconscious of the risk I take in
describing what I believe to be the processes of
literary creation. I cannot guard myself against
another honest man who reads me with surprise,
calls me a liar, and proves me such by references
to the methods he notices are his own. Such a

SELF-CONSCIOUS TECHNIQUE

man may read the following paragraph and smile ;
but I ask him, before he gives me the lie, to
examine carefully the process I describe, and to
be sure that he is not quarrelling with me for the
statement of his own belief in a language other
than his.

An artist is about to make a song. It does
not often sing itself into his head, worded and
tuned as he will write it down. Nor is it often
present to his mind in words at all. It is more
often but a nucleus — two lines of poetry, bur
dened with an invisible body that the artist has
to find, a tune that asks for words or for its own
completion, a presentiment of such and such an
invisible burden that words and tune, if found,
will bring into the light. The inferior artist is
known by dead masks of verse that do not fit the
unseen faces on which he has sought to mould,
or by his good lines, which are the nuclei of
poems he has not known how to write, and, set in
songs that are not tuned to them, blossom sadly
like real roses in gardens of artificial flowers.

The true artist is he who is able to make the
part of his poem indistinguishable in texture
from the whole, who is able to baffle the inquisi
tive reader asking which lines were first imagined,
who is able, that is to say, to preserve an absolute
unity between the nucleus and its elaboration.
The nucleus may itself dictate the form it is to

EDGAH ALLAN POE

fill, like the fragment of a statue implying the
missing limbs, when the poet's business is faith
fully to follow its suggestion. Or, if it be the
presentiment of a whole, it will teach the poet,
who is humble before it, with what delicacy or
coarseness its veins are to be patterned, and what
the texture of skin that its personality demands.
Here, it is clear, is no question of an intertexture
of conventional expressions, but rather the spread
ing of some creeping vitality, sparklike and
separate, until, at last, the whole material break
into a flame. Here, however, lies the truth as
well as the untruth of Shelley's statement. He
interprets " the toil and delay recommended by
critics " as "a careful observation of the inspired
moments." And, indeed, the making of a work
of art asks no more than a tender watchfulness
over the original intuition. From every word
the artist's mind flies back to its starting-point
as if to refer each note to an infallible tuning-
fork. One artist will write down as near as he
can the whole of the poem that is in the making,
and then go over it, removing all that contradicts
the rest. A jigging run of words will be ordered
to a due solemnity. A stately sentence will be
made to trip as light as Ariel. The snowball
meaning of a word — the meaning it has gathered
in its progress through the years — may covertly
deny the impression it is meant to give : he will

SELF-CONSCIOUS TECHNIQUE

erase it from his mind or paper and write another
less refractory. Thus gradually is the poem per
fected, as a boat's crew, once at sixes and sevens,
is trained to work in powerful unison. Another
artist, who can better trust his memory, instead
of working on a whole, will perfect line by line,
conscious of all in writing each, so that when all
are written there will be nothing to correct. In
either case the mental process, and its object, is
the same. The poet's "labour and study" are
devoted to a striving for unity and an avoidance
of hindrance. His care is, that the delicate
breath of the original nucleus or inspiration may
inspire all, and move as freely in the house it has
built, the poet helping, as in the scrap of wall, or
the phantom mansion, that was at first its sole
possession and itself.

Let Shelley appeal to Keats among "the
greatest poets of the present day." Let Keats
betray the genesis of a passage in Hyperion.
I take my example from Mr. Buxton Forman's
edition, where other readings than the final are
printed below the page. Lines 72-79 of the
poem were first written :

" As when upon a tranced summer-night
Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods,
The Oaks stand charmed by the earnest

Stars :

And thus all night without a stir they rest

EDGAR ALLAN POE

Save for one sudden momentary gust
Which comes upon the silence and dies off
As if the Sea of Air had but one wave ;
So came these words and went ; "

Keats' corrections of this text sharpen our feeling
for ugliness and contradictory rhythm, and
admirably illustrate the process of composition I
have just described. The fourth line would
suggest to any one that it needed tuning. " They
rest " see-saws the attention rather than soothes it.
The " st " at the end puzzlingly doubles that of
" gust " in the next verse, with half a suggestion
of rhyme. He substituted " remain." But the
third line also needed improvement. " The oaks
stand charmed " was a little weak and became
" Tall oaks branch-charmed " leaving the verb
over for the next line, which, either before this
alteration or after it, disregarding the first tenta
tive change, was rewritten " Dream and so dream
all night without a stir." In the fifth line, " sud
den momentary " though easily presenting them
selves with the word " gust," falsified the image
he was conveying. He avoided the staccato
suggestion of " momentary " by writing " soli
tary," and for " sudden " he substituted " gradual."
" The Sea of Air " is a phrase, either ineffectual,
or combating the main image with another too
definitely stated. He wrote "as if the ebbing
air," keeping the idea, but softening its impres-

SELF-CONSCIOUS TECHNIQUE

sion. In the final version one inspiration is
dominant throughout, and all contradiction has
been cleared away. The passage, now unalter
able poetry, reads :

" As when, upon a tranced summer-night,
Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest

stars,

Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust
Which comes upon the silence and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave ;
So came these words and went ; "

Labour and study have had their value here,
and their efforts, it is well to notice, have all
been in one direction, unity, the unity of the
passage with itself, and, though that would be
more difficult to show in a couple of pages, the
unity of the passage writh the whole poem.

There is then a real difference between con
ception and craftsmanship. Conception is that
breath on the glowing coal of which Shelley
speaks, and craftsmanship all that knowledge that
helps the artist tenderly watching and remember
ing that moment of brilliance, to prevent the
intertexture from being made of conventional
expressions, and, indeed, to lead the glowing
sparks throughout the mass until the whole is
kindled.

EDGAR ALLAN FOE

When we write of " self-conscious technique "
we mean this process carried out by men aware
of the purpose of their work. Many absolute
and unalterable things have been written by men
without this knowledge, guided only by the
memory of their moments of inspiration, in
tolerant, without knowing why, of words and
phrases that contradicted them. It has been left
for writers of the last hundred and fifty years to
discover what they and their ancestors have been
doing, and so to hang shining lamps over the
desks of other artists. Godwin's inverse method
of writing his book was undertaken for the sake
of the intensity of the interest he was determined
to evoke. He knew that the intensity of an
impression depended on its unity. His technique
was rough, but it showed at least a general under
standing of the principles of creation that have
so long been recognised unstated. Poe went
further than Godwin and demanded that story
or poem should be one throughout, not only in
framework (the • object of Godwin's procedure)
but also in detail, in sentence and in word.

The first of the two paragraphs of which I
spoke, is taken from an essay on Hawthorne
published in 1842 :

"A skilful literary artist has constructed a
tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts
to accommodate his incidents ; but having con-

SELF-CONSCIOUS TECHNIQUE

ceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or
single effect to be wrought out, he then invents
such incidents — he then combines such events as
may best aid him in establishing this preconceived
effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to
the outbringing of this effect, he has failed in his
first step. In the whole composition there should
be no word written, of which the tendency, direct
or indirect, is not to the one pre-established
design. And by such means, with such care and
skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves
in the mind of him who contemplates it with a
kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.
The idea of the tale has been presented un
blemished, because undisturbed. ..."

Poe has been discussing the length of com
positions, and goes on to say that this perfection
is unattainable in the novel, because the novel is
too long to be read with sustained attention at a
sitting. That question need not trouble us here.
We have only to notice that Poe's curse, leading
him not only to do things but to find out how
they are done, showed him that his care in writing
and re-writing was precisely the avoidance of
hindrance and contradiction, the tuning of the
part with the whole, that I have already tried
to describe, The initial inspiration is to rule,
how absolutely this second paragraph from The
Philosophy of Composition, published in 1846,
informs us. There is a cheerful arrogance about

EDGAR ALLAN POE

this paragraph that it is hard riot to respect. Poe,
conscious of his own consciousness, is a little
drunk with free-will; and the result is the
momentary vision of a calm-browed person
sitting between earth and heaven weighing and
choosing with mathematical precision invisible
and imponderable things.

" I prefer commencing with the consideration
of an effect. Keeping originality always in view
— for he is false to himself who ventures to
dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable
a source of interest — I say to myself, in the first
place — 'Of the innumerable effects, or impres
sions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more
generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall
I, on the present occasion, select ? ' Having
chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect,
I consider whether it can be best wrought by
incident or tone — whether by ordinary incidents
and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculi
arity both of incident and tone — afterward
looking about me (or rather within) for such
combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid
me in the construction of the effect."

This means that when the illusion of choice
had left Poe with the nucleus for a tale or poem,
he followed it with careful observation instead of
dragging inspiration bound and captive behind a
runaway pen. Whereas men not self-conscious
work blindly, and are themselves surprised by

SELF-CONSCIOUS TECHNIQUE

the confused effects they produce, Poe watched
his inspiration for guidance, and was determined
that the first shadowing of the effect to be
" constructed " should rule every touch he laid
upon his canvas. It is easy to quarrel with the
violence of his statement, as with Shelley's on
the other side. But, in reading these paragraphs,
we should remember not only that Poe is trying
to carry a point but also that it is hard to make
new principles clear, even to their discoverer,
without throwing a limelight upon them that
makes their shades black, and their whites almost
too luminous. When Baudelaire writes of him
self as "un esprit qui regarde comme le plus
grand honneur du poete d'accomplir juste ce
qu'il a projete de faire," we find the same
thoughts similarly exaggerated, and not until
nearly fifty years after Poe do we get them
softened by the gentler light of day, in Pater's
essay on Style :

" To give the phrase, the sentence, the struc
tural member, the entire composition, song, or
essay, a similar unity with its subject and with
itself: style is in the right way when it tends
towards that. All depends upon the original
unity, the vital wholeness and identity of the
initiatory apprehension or view."

It is easy in Poe's best work, for we must
continually throw aside what was written hur-

EDGAR ALLAN POE

riedly, for bread, too hurriedly to allow that
watching of the remembered moment which he
was one of the first to demand — it is easy to
trace the result of this craftsmanship conscious
of its aims. His theory brought him as near
perfection as his nature would permit. His
stories are the readiest examples. They, the
best of them, are one with themselves, and (so
thorough is their domination by the idea) their
first sentences are ordered by knowledge of
those which are to be the last. Never, except
by that misfortune of his, that left him insensi
tive to the unpleasant qualities of some words
and phrases which the long habit of the language
has taught more delicate ears to find discordant,
does he break for a moment the spell that these
carefully prepared beginnings throw upon his
readers. " II accomplit juste ce qu'il a projete
de faire," to adapt Baudelaire's words, and his
mastery seldom loosens its grasp. In the less
successful works among those by which he was
willing to be known, he slackens his grip by
movements of awkward laughter, hangman's
jokes, which are painful to those who admire him
in his strength. But, in the perfect tales, like
The Masque of the Red Death; Silence : a Fable;
or The Oval Portrait, there is not a movement
that does not contribute to the effect of the
whole.

SELF-CONSCIOUS TECHNIQUE

Let me set side by side some of these begin
nings and endings. The Masque of the Eed
Death opens thus :

" The Red Death had long devastated the
country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal,
or so hideous. Blood was its avatar and its seal
—the redness and the horror of blood. There
were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then
profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolu
tion

It ends :

"And now was acknowledged the presence
of the Red Death. He had come like a thief
in the night. And one by one dropped the re
vellers in the blood-bedewed hall of their revel,
and died, each in the despairing posture of
his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went
out with that of the last of the gay. And the
flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and
Decay and the Red Death held illimitable
dominion over all."

We are led on through gradually increasing
disquietude and terror. How menacing is the
sentence that immediately follows the prelude :
" But the Prince Prospero was happy and
dauntless and sagacious." We feel at once that
the shadow of death is at his elbow.

Shadow : a Parable strikes at once the knell
that is to close it :

81 F

EDGAR ALLAN POE

" Ye who read are still among the living ; but
I who write shall have long since gone my way
into the region of shadows."

This solemn note is reinforced by another as
the tale begins :

" Over some flasks of the red Chian wine,
within the walls of a noble hall in a dim city
called Ptolemais, we sat at night, a company of
seven."

And finally these two deep monotones bell
forth together :

" And the shadow answered, * I am SHADOW,
and my dwelling is near to the Catacombs of
Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of
H elusion which border upon the foul Charonian
canal.' And then did we, the seven, start from
our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and
shuddering, and aghast : for the tones in the
voice of the shadow were not the tones of any
one being, but of a multitude of beings, and
varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable,
fell duskily upon our ears in the well-remembered
and familiar accents of many thousand departed
friends."

Silence: a Fable has a similar double
opening, though here the two notes sound
together at the beginning and, with wonderful
effect, are disentangled at the end.

" ' Listen to mej said the Demon, as he placed

SELF-CONSCIOUS TECHNIQUE

his hand upon my head. ' The region of which
I speak is a dreary region in Libya, by the borders
of the river Zaire. And there is no quiet there,
nor silence.

" ' The waters of the river have a saffron and
sickly hue ; and they flow not onward to the
sea, but palpitate forever and forever beneath the
red eye of the sun with a tumultuous and con
vulsive motion. For many miles on either side
of the river's oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic
water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in
that solitude, and stretch towards the heaven
their long and ghastly necks, and nod to and
fro their everlasting heads. And there is an in
distinct murmur which cometh out from among
them like the rushing of sub-terrene water. And
they sigh one unto the other.

" ' But there is a boundary to their realm —
the boundary of the dark, horrible, lofty forest.
There, like the waves about the Hebrides, the
low underwood is agitated continually. But
there is no wind throughout the heaven. And
the tall primeval trees rock eternally hither and
thither with a crashing and a mighty sound.
And from their high summits, one by one, drop
everlasting dews. And at the roots strange
poisonous flowers lie writhing in perturbed
slumber. And overhead, with a rustling and
loud noise, the grey clouds rush westwardly
forever, until they roll, a cataract, over the fiery
wall of the horizon. But there is no wind
throughout the heaven. And by the shores
of the river Zaire there is neither quiet nor
silence.' '

EDGAR ALLAN POE

It is worth while to notice in this the careful,
if rather elementary music, and the refrain
" And there is no quiet there, nor silence "
repeating itself with gathered emphasis at the
end of the description, while in the second and
third paragraphs are internal refrains : in the
second — " They sigh one unto the other " ; and
in the third — " But there is no wind throughout
the heaven."

Then, turning to the end, we hear the two
notes separate. The Demon is finishing his
tale:

" * And mine eyes fell upon the countenance
of the man, and his countenance was wan with
terror. And, hurriedly, he raised his head from
his hand, and stood forth upon the rock and
listened. But there was no voice throughout the
vast illimitable desert, and the characters upon
the rock were SILENCE. And the man shud
dered and turned his face away, and fled afar
off, in haste, so that I beheld him no more.'

" Now there are fine tales in the volumes of
the Magi — in the iron-bound, melancholy
volumes of the Magi. Therein, I say, are
glorious histories of the Heaven, and of the
Earth, and of the mighty Sea — and of the Genii
that overruled the sea, and the earth, and the
lofty heaven. There was much lore too in the

SELF-CONSCIOUS TECHNIQUE

sayings which were said by the Sibyls ; and holy,
holy things were heard of old by the dim leaves
that trembled around Dodona — but, as Allah
liveth, that fable which the Demon told me, as
he sat by my side in the shadow of the tomb, I
hold to be the most wonderful of all ! And as
the Demon made an end of his story, he fell
back^within the cavity of the tomb and laughed.
And I could not laugh with the Demon, and he
cursed me because I could not laugh. And the
lynx, which dwelleth for ever in the tomb,
came out therefrom, and lay down at the feet
of the Demon, and looked at him steadily in the
face."

How admirably justified is the introduction
of the lynx. So true is the note that I should
not be surprised if nine readers out of ten never
observe that the existence of the beast has not
been mentioned before. The whole image is a
fine example of daring trust in the one infallible
test, of unity with the original inspiration.

TALES

IN talking of the material of a work of art, we
must not forget that we are only speaking in an
inaccurate way of the personality of the artist.
It is vain to hope for an understanding of the
art of pottery frem an analysis of the clay the
potter uses. It would, however, be instructive
to note how this and that material influenced
the shapes that could be turned from it upon his
wheel. We should find that we were approaching
a geographical knowledge ; learning that such
and such districts produce such and such forms of
pottery, and, conversely, that from a specimen of
ware we could more or less inexactly guess some of
the characteristics of the country whence it came.
A similar knowledge can be won from an exami
nation of the material of works of art. They
were built, we can say, from this or that species
of impressions ; they flowered from this or that
intellectual subsoil.

But not all the tales and poems of a man be-
long truly to his nature. Here and there he has
gathered a handful of earth from countries not

EDGAR ALLAN POE

his own, and, in these shallow beds he has growi]
flowers that spring the quicker for their lack of
root, and only betray the weakness of their soil
by dying as they open to the sun. Here our
criterion must be the works of art rather than
their material, and we must rely upon our taste
to distinguish dead flowers from living, native
intuitions from arbitrary specimens of acclima
tisation. This is markedly the case with Foe,
whose will frequently chose an " effect " foreign
to his genius, and then tried to whip up impres-
-^ sions to produce it. Again and again in the
,X stories so inspired we can cjetect moments of
strange vitality, the lingering looks of the spirit
toward its own and peculiar province of impres
sion.

That province was not the wide and various
territory of a Balzac, but rather a small grove
closed in by tall trees, filled always with dusk.
The ground must be trodden warily for fear of
open graves. Here and there are fallen tomb
stones, and, in the twilight, strange flowers rise
from between them, like those fierce irises whose
orange fiery tongues creep out on lips veined
terribly with white and purple. The faces of
the ghosts that walk here are twisted with pain
or fear. No priest has exorcised them, and their
mortal bodies have not had Christian burial.
From this narrow grove Poe brought the

TALEiS

strange tales by which he is most widely remem
bered, and here his spirit had its home when it
was not wandering clear-eyed and critical about
a more ordinary world. When, as Poe would
have put it, he left his intellect for his soul, he
found it here, aloof indeed from the arena
of his purely intellectual activities. Many
things, however, called him elsewhere, and, in
the stories that resulted from his wanderings, it
is interesting to trace those flashes of homesick
ness in which he remembers himself.

Poe, the critic, admired the skill of Defoe in
giving verisimilitude to fiction. We have read
in the chapter on his criticism the note in
which he described the effect of Robinson Crusoe.
He wished to produce such an effect with tales
of his own writing. The Adventures of Arthur
Gordon Pym and the Journal of Julius
Rodman written two years later, represent un
finished attempts to create new Crusoes. The
fact that they are without ends is itself sugges
tive. In reading them it is curious to watch
Poe's genius escaping from the galley where he
had bound his cleverness to an oar, and swiftly
flying to the remembered place of strange dreams
and sepulchral imaginations. The style of Defoe,
a paved causeway, swells and heaves, glaucous
coloured grass springs up through the interstices,
and flowers like drops of blood, while the plain

EDGAR ALLAN POE

stones are covered with a variegated fungus.
Poe begins :

" My name is Arthur Gordon Pym. My
father was a respectable trader in sea-stores at
Nantucket, where I was born. My maternal
grandfather was an attorney in good practice. . . ."

and, parodying not too accurately the style of
Robinson, goes on with accounts of shipwreck
and mutiny and voyages to undiscovered lands.
But presently the style changes. A ship like
The Flying Dutchman sails by and disappears.
Saffron-coloured corpses lie upon her decks and
lean upon her bulwarks, and, as she passes, a
huge sea-gull, spattered with blood, draws its
beak and talons from the body where it feasts,
and, flyjng over the heads of Pym and his com
panion, drops at their feet "a piece of clotted
and liver-like substance." After which Poe
turns again to his longitudes and latitudes,
succeeding very fairly well in making the veri
similitude he desired. But, by the time the
book breaks off, Pym's adventures are tuned to
a pitch beyond credibility. Pym and his com
panion in a small boat sail, under clouds of white
ashes, over a milky ocean, too hot to be endured
by the naked hand, towards a silent cataract that
curtains the horizon.

"At intervals there were visible in it wide,

TALES

yawning, but momentary rents, and from out
these rents, within which was a chaos of flitting
and indistinct images, there came rushing and
mighty but soundless winds, tearing up the en
kindled ocean in their course. . . . And now we
rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where
a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But
there arose in our pathway a shrouded human
figure, very far larger in its proportions than
any dweller among men. And the hue of the
skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness
of the snow."

It was almost inevitable that Pym should die
and his manuscript be lost, for a reconciliation
between Defoe and his imitator was no longer
possible.

The Journal of Julius Rodman is more con
sistent in tone. It purports to be the revised
notes of the first man who crossed the Rocky
Mountains. There are in it encounters with
Indians, described like those of Robinson with
his savages, and it breaks off after a battle with
a couple of bears chronicled more seriously than
the piece of sport shown by Man Friday with his
grizzly. Poe loads his narrative with detailed
catalogues of food and arms in the approved
i manner, but gave himself a narrow safety-valve
by making Rodman sensitive to nature and an
exuberant describer of landscape, which, in
Defoe's time, had not yet begun to exist, except

EDGAR ALLAN POE

as something difficult or easy to traverse. Poe's
intention is shown in such sentences as this :

" My father had been very fond of Pierre, and
I thought a great deal of him myself; he was
a great favourite, too, with my younger sister,
Jane, and I believe they would have been
married had it been God's will to have spared
her."

The fact that it was foreign to his nature is
betrayed in such as this :

" The two rivers presented the most enchanting
appearance as they wound away their long snake-
like lengths in the distance, growing thinner and
thinner until they looked like mere faint threads
of silver as they vanished in the shadowy mists
of the sky."

I find a very characteristic sign of the intel
lectual character of Poe's invention in his
description of Rodman's appearance :

" He was about twenty-five years of age, when
he started up the river. He was a remarkably
vigorous and active man, but short in stature,
not being more than five feet three or four inches
high — strongly built, with legs somewhat bowed.
His physiognomy was of a Jewish cast, his lips
thin, and his complexion saturnine."

Rodman's task was to take his men over the
Rocky Mountains, as Hannibal had led his Car-

TALES

thaginians over the Alps. He had to be a
leader. Few but Poe would have thought of
sketching him in the lines of the popular imagi
nation of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Poe's attempts at verisimilitude contain occa
sional flashes of himself. He appears more
rarely in those tales in which, instead of aping an
eighteenth- century Defoe, he masquerades as a
nineteenth- century humorist. His conception
of humour was not elementary. There is no
round Rabelaisian laughter in him at the con
trast between man the animal and man the God.
Nor does he, with Shakespeare, see big, boy-like
men playing like children in a serious world, or
taking a laughable one with gravity. There is
no fat or juice in Poe's amusement. His sense
of the ridiculous is lean and pinched, and moves;
pity rather than laughter in his readers. It is:
the humour of a hungry man who is a little
angry. He laughs in a falsetto and the world
will not join in the chorus. Some schoolmasters
make jokes like his, jokes that to their pupils do
but deepen the monotony they are intended to
relieve. When, in a tragic story, Poe introduces
a scrap of would-be ridicule, we have to pass it
j over with forgiveness instead of relishing it like
the humour in Shakespeare's solemn plays. It
does not fill out his conception to the broad pro
portions of humanity, but is a blemish upon it,

EDGAR ALLAN POE

an excrescence that we would be glad to do with
out. And when, in his mad confidence that the
discrepancies he saw were as amusing to others
'as to his own serious mind, he wrote whole tales
.of nothing else, he found that the laughter
/evaporated as he wrote, and that he had to over-
• emphasise all his points to get any effect at all.
Small things amuse big minds of a peculiar
species. I believe Poe often laughed at the gro
tesque ideas and bad puns that he, or any one
else, could easily invent. I believe he was really
amused by the long-drawn-out witticisms that
seem to us so dull. I cannot otherwise under
stand how he could print them not only in
magazines that paid for them, but also in books
that did not and were not likely to bring him
any money. His case suggests that it might be
possible to reason that humorists are men with
a sluggish sense of humour. The incidents or
ideas that make them laugh are laughable indeed,
whereas the thinnest little ghost of a pale joke
will shake the sides of those who, like Poe, are
unable to compel others to share their enjoy
ment. Perhaps, instead of saying of some
ridiculous occurrence that it would make a cat
laugh, we should be more truly praising it in
exclaiming that it would make Charles Dickens
smile. It might be possible to argue so. Who
but one with very active muscles of laughter

TALES

could smile, unless with sorrow, at the Court
Guide in King Pest ?

" The other exalted personages whom you be
hold are all of our family, and wear the insignia
of the blood royal under the respective titles of
'His Grace the Arch- Duke Pest-Iferous,' 'His
Grace the Duke Pest-Ilential,' < His Grace the
Duke Tern- Pest,' and ' Her Serene Highness the
Arch-Duchess Ana-Pest."

We have been spoiled by the great masters of
humour, and our pampered minds can find
nothing funny in such simple jests as these. Yet
Poe filled a volume with such stuff. Sir Path-
rick O'Grandison Barranitt tells, in the style of
Charles O'Malley, of an incident in his rivalry
with a little Frenchman, and we remain hope
lessly solemn. The Angel of the Odd talks like
Hans Breitmann, and we do not smile. The
printer's devil substitutes " x's " for " o's " in a
paragraph, and when he tells us that it made some
body "x(cross) in the x-treme," we are more
sad than merry.

Yet, even in these tales of dead laughter and
demands for smiles that do not come, Poe some
times touches his own note, and the withered
second-rate jester suddenly rises in stature, and
the empty wrinkles round his eyes disappear into
cavernous and impressive hollows. Even in
King Pest, with its annoying verbal witticisms,

97 G

EDGAR ALLAN POE

is a paragraph in which Poe comes to his
own:

" Had they not, indeed, been intoxicated be
yond moral sense, their reeling footsteps must
have been palsied by the horrors of their situa
tion. The air was cold and misty. The paving-
stones, loosened from their beds, lay in wild con
fusion amid the tall rank grass which sprang up
around the feet and ankles. Fallen houses
choked up the streets. The most fetid and
poisonous smells everywhere prevailed ; and by
the aid of that ghastly light which, even at mid
night, never fails to emanate from a vapoury and
pestilential atmosphere, might be discerned lying
in the by-paths and alleys, or rotting in the
windowless habitations, the carcase of many a
nocturnal plunderer arrested by the hand of the
plague in the very perpetration of his robbery."

Poe seems to have been unable to leave his
admirations to themselves. He was always
tempted to turn them into emulations, and it
was almost always through some delight of his
critical mind that he was led to the attempting
of tasks foreign to his genius. Just as his under
standing of the excellence of Defoe made him
eager to imitate the master whose secret he per
ceived, so his pleasure in the discoveries of science,
the pleasure of the amateur, of the uninitiated,
made him desirous of using it in his own way,
and, as an artist, of carrying further the marvels

TALES

whose existence- had been proved by the pro
fessors. Critic and metaphysician as he was, I
think that at some moments of his career he
would readily have flung away these titles, like
those of poet and storyteller, if he could have
been given instead of them the name of ajscien-
tific discoverer. There are many indications in
hljTscientific tales that he plumes himself as much
on his knowledge and conjecture as on the tales
in which they are turned to account. He learnt
what science he knew from popular works, but
was certainly able, on these not very deep foun
dations, to raise quite ingenious edifices of specu
lation. In Hans Pfaall, for example, he
anticipates Jules Verne, and describes a voyage
to the moon, whose plausibility, however, is a
little lessened by the tone of banter in which
parts of the story are told. He lets us see too
clearly that he is laughing in his sleeve, and at
the same time is very careful in securing veri
similitude, and apparent submission to the laws
of science. He does not allow Hans Pfaall to fly
to the moon, in the free and easy manner of the
hero of Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyage auoc Etats
de la Lune, for his interest is more in the flight
than in what is to be found on alighting, which,
in fact, never gets described. Poe busies himself
in contriving an oxygen-making apparatus for
turning a rarefied atmosphere into fit stuff for

EDGAR ALLAN POE

breathing. He makes calculations of weights
and distances, and finds pleasure in such logical
invention as sees that the balloon turns round
and descends bottom downwards to the moon,
after passing the point at which the lunar attrac
tion exceeds that of the earth. If such a voyage
had been made, Foe would have been eager to
point out that he had foreseen its possibility, and
forecast its method. In another story he describes
the crossing of the Atlantic by airship. This was
printed as truth in the columns of a newspaper,
and did indeed deceive many. Here, too, he is
happy with calculations and deductions, and the
same kind of logical invention as pleased him in
Hans Pfaall. Of these tales the most consistent
in tone is The Descent into the Maelstrom, which,
although, like The Pit and the Pendulum,
empty of spiritual significance, yet makes an
effect tuned more closely with his mind. The
measured description of the whirlpool fitly
prepares the reader for the narrative of the man
who has been sucked into its depths, and we are
grateful to Poe for his ingenious piece of reason
ing about the respective resistance offered by
cylinders and other bodies swimming in a vortex,
that, at the last moment, is sufficient to save the
unfortunate, whose hope and despair we have
already made our own.

Among these scientific dreams and imaginative
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TALES

projections of scientific into pictorial and concrete
fact are two stories in which Foe's peculiar
powers are more easily detected. These are :
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and
Mesmeric Revelation. Both are tales -of men
preserved beyond death by mesmerism, and
talking, as it were, from the farther side of the
gulf. Both were written in later years, and are
examples of the work of the metaphysician whose
work we shall discuss in a later chapter. The
first is the more physical of the two studies.
Valdemar is mesmerised when on ,the point of
death, and, from a mesmeric trance, signifies to
the operator the stages of his sinking and the
moment of his actual dissolution. For seven
months he is preserved under the mesmeric in
fluence, while his body does not decay, and all
physical processes are seemingly arrested. At
the end of that time he is awakened by the
customary passes. He cries out to be put once
more to sleep or to be finally awakened. The
operator tries to mesmerise him again, but,
failing through lack of will power, works earnestly
for the removal of the spell.

" As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid
ejaculations of 'dead ! dead ! ' absolutely bursting
from the tongue and not from the lips of the
sufferer, his whole frame at once — within the
space of a single minute, or even less — shrunk,

101

EDGAR ALLAN POE

crumbled — absolutely rotted away beneath my
hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company,
there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of
detestable putridity."

Mesmeric Revelation reports a conversation
between the mesmerist and his patient, a philoso
pher who believes that from his self- cognisance in
the mesmeric state may be learnt some truth that,
in an ordinary condition, his powers of reasoning
would not be so acute as to discover. A series
of questions bring as answers some of the ideas
that were already shaping Poe's Eureka, and the
tale ends with the philosopher's death.

" As the sleep-walker pronounced these latter
words, in a feeble tone, I observed in his coun
tenance a singular expression, which somewhat
alarmed me and induced me to wake him at once.
No sooner had I done this than, with a bright
smile irradiating all his features, he fell back
upon his pillow and expired. 1 noticed that in
less than a minute afterward his corpse had all
the stern rigidity of stone. His brow was of the
coldness of ice. Thus, ordinarily, should it have
appeared only after long pressure from AzraeFs
hand. Had the sleep-walker, indeed, during the
latter portion of his discourse, been addressing
me from out the region of the shadows ? "

It is clear in all these stories, less expressions
than attempts at expression, how much of Poe's

102

TALES

work as an artist was merely illustrative of his
adventures as a critic and thinker. In the last
two are indications of what came to be the pre
vailing character of his thought, indications which
are elsewhere again and again confirmed. When
Poe was not thinking of beauty he was thmking
of God, and so of death ; and much of his thought
on God and beauty came to be associated with
death when he allowed it to appear in work whose
aim was aesthetic rather than scientific. The
confusion in his mind between beauty and melan
choly, death being taken as its symbol, caused
one of the flaws in his theory of aesthetic, one of
the brambles that entangled his pursuit of truth.
There are tears of beauty and tears of sorrow,
and Poe did not distinguish between them.
Artists have not yet got so far as thinkers in
freeing their souls from fettering catalogues of
the things they admire, which they confound
with the beautiful. They will still give lists of
beautiful things, betraying rather the colours of
their temperaments than the acuteness of their
understandings. Different men are moved to
aesthetic expression by different things ; it is
hard for them to realise that beauty is not
exclusively the possession of the things that
make expression, and so beauty, possible to
themselves. Poe passes very near the truth in
saying :

103

EDGAR ALLAN POE

" When indeed men speak of Beauty, they
mean precisely not a quality, as is supposed, but
an effect ; they refer, in short, just to that intense
and pure elevation of soul — not of intellect or of
heart — upon which I have commented, and which
is experienced in consequence of contemplating
'the beautiful."

There is a taper of illumination in that sen
tence. It flickers when he writes :

" Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme
development, invariably excites the sensitive soul
to tears. Melancholy then is the most legitimate
of all the poetical tones."

It dies absolutely when he continues :

" Now, never losing sight of the object,
supremeness, "or perfection, at all points, I asked
myself, ' Of all melancholy topics, what, accord
ing to the universal understanding of mankind,
is the most melancholy ? ' ' Death,' was the
obvious reply. ' And when,' I said, ' is this most
melancholy of topics most poetical ? ' From
what I have already explained at some length,
the answer here also is obvious — 6 When it most
closely allies itself to Beauty." The death, then,
of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the
most poetical topic in the world — and equally
is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for
such a topic are those of a bereaved lover."

There the light is dead, and Poe only tells
us that he is a melancholy man who is easiest

104

TALES

prompted to aesthetic expression by the emotions
belonging to death and bereavement.

Robert Burton, in the Anatomy of Melan
choly, writes of Phantasie or Imagination,
"whose organ is the middle cell' of the brain,"
that, "in melancholy men this faculty is most
powerful and strong, and often hurts, producing
many monstrous and prodigious things, especially
if it be stirred up by some terrible object pre
sented to it from common sense or memory."
Monstrous and prodigious things did this man
produce, whose brain sought a white light and a
rarefied air in which to think, while his tempera
ment dragged it back continually to graveyard
mists and that grove of purple, poisonous flowers.
Setting on one side the analytical tales, which
are a subject for separate discussion, we may
note that almost all the best of his remaining
stories, in which his inspiration is not turned to
invention by the arbitrary interference and in
tention of his will, are concerned directly or
indirectly with the idea of death. They are
variations on a Funeral March, played now
almost silently with muffled notes, now with
reverberating thunder, now in a capricious stac
cato, now with the jangling of madness, the
notes tripping each other up as they rush
along, and now so slowly that the breath of his
listeners waits for suffocation in their throats in

105

EDGAR ALLAN POE

expectation of the phrases that are continually
postponed.

But death is the catastrophe of many stories
beside Poe's. It is a bulky incident in life, and
consequently one that readily offers itself for the
purposes of art. Poe, however, was peculiar in
his use of it. He does not watch a death-bed
and make notes of the humanity of the patient.
He does not make us feel the painful emotions
of the men and women who see their friend
irrevocably departing from them. There is no
irony, no sadness, no setting of familiar things in
the light that in death's presence seems to pierce
the curtain that divides those who have gone
from those who, busying themselves with irrele
vant things, are waiting to go in their turn.
Most writers seek in death an enhancement of
the value of life, and find in mortality a means of
elucidating humanity. Death with them is a
significant moment of life. Death with Poe is
Death. The metaphysician is obsessed by it as
the point where simple calculations slip through
into the fourth dimension. The artist is con- /
cerned with death as something separate from
life, something whose circumstances are special
and terrible.

It has been said that the horror of Poe's tales
of death is purely physical. A quality more
universally theirs is that of peculiarity of circum-

106

TALES

stance. The people who die, or have killed, or
are about to die, are unusual, and the manners
of the deaths, or the condition of mind in which
they are prepared for them, are extraordinary.
In some cases the death is no physical death, but
v the murder of half a soul by its fellow, as in the
tale of William Wilson. In others the deaths
are those of reincarnated spirits (Morella) of
madmen (the murderers of The Tell- Tale Heart
and The Black Cat] or of souls whose bodies
are snatched in the moment of dissolution by
spirits who have already left the earth (Ligeia).
Brooding over the idea of death, Poe found his
way into other corners of speculation, and the
mere fact of dying became clothed for him with
the strangely coloured garments of the weird.

He plays none of the witch melody that
Hawthorne knows. Poe is interested in the
conscience, but does not make of it and the faith
that it sometimes implies a background to throw
up into relief the figures that dance to his music.
No penalties to be enacted in another world
heighten the importance of deeds done in this.
He is not, except as a metaphysician, concerned
with the soul after death, but only tunes its
progress to the grave. His fingers will lift no
trumpet on the day of a judgment in which he
does not believe. His interest as a story-teller is
with the terrors of the soul before yet it has

107

EDGAR ALLAN POE

separated from the body. x Let it wake in the
coffin and beat with the fingers that are still its
own upon the weighted lid. Poe will be with it
in its agony. Hawthorne, thinking of Heaven
and Hell, forgets the worms. Poe hears them
eating through the rotten wood.

But though death is the motive that runs
through them, Poe's best stories are not concerned
only with mortality. He parades his corpses in
the dim neutral country between ordinary life
and the life that remains uncharted and scarcely
explored. We have to remember in reading
him that the geography of humanity changes
from age to age, and that when, in his tales of
mesmerism, for example, he seems to be moving
in districts now open to the public, those districts
when he wrote were no less shadowy than the
world beyond the horizon to the dwellers in the
caves. In William Wilson he is using, long
before Stevenson, the idea of dual personality.
In The Oval Portrait, where a painter transfers
the very soul of his lady to the canvas, and, as
the portrait seems to breathe alive, turns round
to find her dead, he is using the subtle, half-
thought things that an earlier writer would
scarcely have felt, or, if he had, would have
brushed like cobwebs secretly aside. Then there
is the Germanesque story of the horse whose soul
is a man and carries that man's enemy headlong

108

TALES

into a flaming castle. The Assignation is an
objective piece of colour. The Black Cat and
The Tell-Tale Heart are stories of murder
and its discovery, threaded with hitherto un-
imagined varieties of madness. The note common|
to all is that of the weird, and Poe keeps warib
along the narrow strip of country that is neith(
frankly supernatural, nor yet prosaic enough tv y
be commonplace.

The effect of the weird is not very old in story
telling, though the terrible and the monstrous
have long been motives of narrative. Its appear
ance is almost synchronous with the eighteenth-
century birth of the Romantic movement. Its
first thrill has been traced to a passage in one
of Smollett's novels. It does not necessarily use
the supernatural, although it perhaps implies an
appeal to those half-forgotten states of mind
that would once have so considered the details
that stimulate it. It is possible that for the
weird, as for many other romantic effects, like
those of the clash of sword and of the hunting of
beasts, our ancestors thrill within us, and com
municate their shudders to ourselves. It is worth
while, in thinking of Poe's use of it, to consider
its short history in art. Our attitude towards the
weird or the fantastic, with which it is closely
allied, defined itself with some rapidity. Mrs.
Radcliffe, when she secured a weird effect by the

109

EDGAR ALLAN POE

lighting of blue flames on the points of the
soldiers' lances before the Castle of Udolpho, was
careful to write in a footnote : " See the Abbe
Berthelon on Electricity." Miracles were already
powerless before the Royal Society, and whereas,
not half a century before, Horace Walpole had
lifted his giant warrior to heaven in a clap of
thunder, a writer in the later day would have
been careful to show the wires and pulleys that
hoisted the monster to the skies. Mrs. Radcliffe,
eager to serve two gods, gave us our thrill
and our electricity together. Her fictions, clever
as they are, are a little laughable on that account,
and when Poe executes a marvel and explains it,
as in Thou art the Man! he drops his story
into a class below that of his best work. But
with the later Romantics came a clearer under
standing. Theophile Gautier, in an essay on
Hoffmann, says, in praising him :

" Besides, Hoffmann's marvellous is not the
marvellous of the fairy tales : he has always one
foot in the real world, and one does not see
much in him of carbuncle palaces with diamond
turrets. The talismans and wonders of The
Arabian Nights are of no use to him. Occult
sympathies and dislikes, peculiar manias, visions,
magnetism, the mysterious and malevolent in
fluence of an evil principle that he only vaguely
suggests, these are the supernatural and extra
ordinary elements that Hoffmann is accustomed

110

TALES

to use. This is the positive and the plausible of
the fantastic."

He might almost be writing of Poe. Even so,
he does not dig at the root of the question, but
only at the loose soil about its trunk. For there
is no untruth in fairy tale so long as we can be
made to believe in it and do not require to have
it reduced to terms of the Abbe Berthelon. It
was left to another Romantic to make a philo
sophical statement of the difficulty. We re
member with Teufelsdrockh :

" The potency of Names ; which indeed are
but one kind of such Custom-woven, wonder-
hiding Garments. Witchcraft, and all manner'
of Spectre- work and Demonology, we have
now named Madness and Diseases of the
Nerves. Seldom reflecting that still the new
question comes upon us : What is Madness,
what are Nerves ? Ever, as before, does Madness
remain a mysterious-terrific altogether infernal
boiling up of the Nether Chaotic Deep, through
this fair- painted Vision of Creation which swims
thereon, which we name the Real. Was
Luther's picture of the Devil less a Reality,
whether it were framed within the bodily eye, or
without it? In every the wisest Soul lies a
whole world of internal Madness, an authentic
Demon-Empire ; out of which, indeed, his world
of Wisdom has been creatively built together,
and now rests there, as on its dark foundations
does a habitable flowery Earth rind."

Ill

EDGAR ALLAN POE

Truth is so variable except in its relation to
the soul. The facts of physical science turn into
butterflies and elude us as we grasp them. The
Demon-Empire is all-powerful as soon as we
believe in it, and to do that we must be moved
by one who has been himself under its sway.
The priests of the weird do not enjoy the even
life of other men. A few, like Gautier, have
visited the temple sometimes, and escaped before
its curse has fallen on them. But Gerard de
Nerval hanged himself with a bootlace, that
may have been the Queen of Sheba's garter, to a
lodging-house door in a back street of a Paris
that may have been Baghdad. Hoffmann lay in
bed petrifying from his feet up in expiation of
those nights in the tavern where, in the fumes of
beer and smoke, he saw Krespel dancing with the
crape in his hat, and the floating shadows of
Callot's grotesques, that seemed inextricably
related to his own. Poe's death, as wretched as
either of these, has already been described.
They are men who have submitted to " les Bien-
faits de la Lune." The weird is that strange
child to whom Baudelaire overheard the Moon
speaking :

" Tu seras la reine des hommes aux yeux verts
dont j'ai serre aussi la gorge dans mes caresses
nocturnes ; de ceux-la qui aiment la mer, la mer
immense, tumultueuse et verte, 1'eau informe et

112

TALES

multiforme, le lieu ou ils ne sont pas, la femme
qu'ils ne connaissent pas, les fleurs sinistres qui
ressemblent aux encensoirs d'une religion incon-
nue, les parfums qui troublent la volonte, et les
animaux sauvages et voluptueux qui sont les
emblemes de leur folie."

Poe was one of these, and that fact is the
secret of his power. He would reverse Gautier's
confession, and write it : "I love a phantom
better than a statue, and twilight better than full
noon." (For him "the invisible world existed,"
and his excursions on the common earth were
less personal to himself, and less real than his V
travels in that other country that is and is not,
like a landscape in a dream, and is and is not
again. His stories leave us richer not in facts
but in emotions. We find our way with their v^
help into novel corners of sensation. They are
like rare coloured goblets or fantastic metal-
work, and we find, often with surprise, that we
have waited for them. That is their vindication,
that the test between the valueless and the
invaluable of the fantastic. There are tales of
twisted extravagance that stir us with no more
emotion than is given by an accidental or cap
ricious decoration, never felt or formed in the
depths of a man. There are others whose ex
travagance is arbitrary, ingenious and incredible
because explained. But the best of Poe's tales,

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

like those patterns however grotesque that have
once meant the world to a mind sensible to
beauty, have a more than momentary import.
Like old melody, like elaborate and beautiful
dancing, like artificial light, like the sight of
poison or any other concentrated power, they
are among the significant experiences that are
open to humanity.

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POETRY

POETRY for Poe was " a passion rather than a
purpose," and he thought about it considerably
more often than he practised it. Certain of his
theories, that limited its scope to a particular
vein of material, prevented him from playing with
it the tricks that he played with his other art of
narrative. He did not drag it, as he dragged his
story-telling, in pursuit of his critical admirations.
He did not expect it, as he expected his story
telling, to turn, like a chameleon, the colour of
whatever mood he laid it on. Limiting it to the
expression of a single aspect of himself, he was
content to wait for the moments when that
aspect was his, and, when they did not come,
to do no more than to revise what he had
already written. Consequently, his poetry, in
spite of his preference for it, bults little in his
work, and is almost overshadowed by the volume
of his poetical theory.

I shall try, as far as possible by means of
direct quotation, to outline that theory's more
important points.

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

We have already observed, in a brief note on
his criticism, that Poe protested against the
error of supposing didacticism to be a motive
of poetry. He speaks in The Poetic Principle
of "a heresy too palpably false to be long
tolerated, but one which, in the brief period it
has already endured, may be said to have
accomplished more in the corruption of our
Poetical Literature than all its other elements
combined."

" I allude to the heresy of Tlie Didactic. It
has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly
and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all
Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should
inculcate a moral ; and by this moral is the
poetical merit of the work to be adjudged.
We Americans, especially, have patronised this
happy idea ; and we Bostonians, very especially,
have developed it in full. We have taken it
into our heads that to write a poem simply for
the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to
have"b^etr~OTir design, would be to confess our
selves radically wanting in the true Poetic
Dignity and Force ; but the simple fact is, that,
would we but permit ourselves to look into our
own souls, we should immediately there discover
that under the sun there exists nor can exist any
work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely
noble, than this very poem — this poem per se —
this poem which is a poem and nothing more
—this poem written solely for the poem's sake."

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POETRY

The Poetic Principle was published in 1850,
after Poe's death. Eight years earlier, in a review
of Longfellow's ballads, he had very ingeniously
suggested how didacticism, once an accidental
undercurrent, had come to be considered essential
to poetry.

" Mankind have seemed to define Poesy in a
thousand, and in a thousand conflicting, defini
tions. But the war is only one of words. In
duction is as well applicable to this subject as to
the most palpable and utilitarian ; and by its
sober processes we find that, in respect to com
positions which have been really received as
poems, the imaginative, or, more popularly, the
creative portions alone have insured them to be
so received. Yet these works, on account of
these portions, having once been so received and
so named, it has happened, naturally and inevit
ably, that other portions totally unpoetic have
not only come to be regarded by the popular
voice as poetic, but have been made to serve as
false standards of perfection, in the adjustment of
other poetical claims. Whatever has been found
in whatever has been received as a poem has
been blindly regarded as ex statu poetic. And
this is a species of gross error which scarcely
could have made its way into any less intangible
topic. In fact, that licence, which appertains to
the Muse herself, it has been thought decorous,
if not sagacious, to indulge, in all examinations
of her character."

When he wrote that he had not yet written
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EDGAR ALLAN POE

the most valuable sentence \i\f Eureka : " A
perfect consistency is no other than an absolute
truth." He perceived only that poetry had
nothing to do with the truth of novelists and
teachers. The., "ficst, ^element " of poetry was
" Jhe thirst for supernal beauty — a beauty which
is not afforded the soul by any existing colloca
tion of the earth's forms — a beauty which,
perhaps, no possible combination of those forms
would fully produce." Those two negations
show that he was on the way to discovery, but
he had not yet seen that this beauty was itself
the quality of a kind of truth, the truth of art,
" an absolute truth " when " a perfect consist
ency." He had not yet distinguished between
the truth of morals and the truth of art.
Supernal beauty had not yet been recognised
by him as the invariable companion of the only
truth that is above argument. Yet, working in
the dark, his face was in the right direction, and
his eyes were keen. He did not, as a lesser and
more headlong thinker would have done, reject
moral truth altogether, but generously allowed
it its humble place in poetry, its importance as
of a colour or a note of music with a higher end
to serve. Benedetto Croce goes no further.

In The Poetic Principle, which, published in
1850, is a lecture, and so in its final form probably
represents his ideas very shortly before his death,

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POETRY

he still does not follow the line of thought which
Eureka had thrown open. He is more polite to
the truth of logic (in issuing that book he had
openly set up as a thinker) but he does not call
poetry by any name that would show he had
seen the trend of his own thinking, and recognised
poetry as truth of a different kind.

" With as deep a reverence for the True as
ever inspired the bosom of man, I would, never
theless, limit in some measure its modes of
inculcation. I would limit to enforce them. I
would not enfeeble them by dissipation. The
demands of Truth are severe ; she has no sym
pathy with the myrtles. All that which is so
indispensable in Song, is precisely all that with
which she has nothing to do. It is but making
her a flaunting paradox to wreathe her in gems
and flowers. In enforcing a truth we need
severity rather than efflorescence of language.
We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be
cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a wt>rd, we must
be in that mood, which, as nearly as possible, is
the exact converse of the. poetical. He must be
blind indeed who does not perceive the radical
and chasmal differences between the truthful and
the poetical modes of inculcation. He must be
theory-mad beyond redemption who, in spite of
these differences, shall still persist in attempting
to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of
Poetry and Truth."

This would seem final. I shall run the risk of
121

EDGAR AL'LAN POE

being myself considered theory-mad, if I point out
that he protests against the attempted reconcilia
tion not of poetry and truth, but of lyrical and
logical truth, of the concrete and the abstract,
or, as Croce puts it, of intuition and conception.
He sums up the result of his thinking in these
two paragraphs :

" To recapitulate, then : I would define, in
brief, the Poetry gf. words as The Rhythmical
Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste.
With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it
has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally,
it has no concern whatever either with Duty or
with Truth.

" A few words, however, in explanation. vThat
pleasure which is at once the most pure, the
most elevating, and the most intense, is derived,
I maintain, from the contemplation of the
Beautiful.' In the ^oM^mglS^n^nS^it^we^
alone find it possible to attain _Uiat pleasurable
elevation, or excitement, of the so^/3 which we
recognise as the Poetic Sentiment, and which is
so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the
satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion,
which is the excitement of the Heart. ' I make
Beauty, therefore — using the word as inclusive
of the sublime — I make Beauty the province of
the poem, simply because it is an obvious rule of
Art that effects should be made to spring as
directly as possible from their causes — no one as
yet having been weak enough to deny that the
peculiar elevation in question is at least most

122

POETRY

readily attainable in the poem. It by no means
follows, however, that the incitements of Passion,
or the precepts of Duty, or even the lessons of
Truth, may not be introduced into a poem, and
with advantage ; for they may subserve, incident
ally, in various ways, the general purposes of the
work ; but the true artist will always contrive to
tone them down in proper subjection to that
Beauty which is the atmosphere and the real
essence of the poem."

Bold utterance, this, in the America of Lowell,
Longfellow, and Emerson.

Poe's theories, however, did not stop at a
definition of poetry. Spending much of his time
in reviewing bad poets, and learning continually
from his own work in prose, he busied himself in
many considerations of craftsmanship. Baude
laire calls him " un poete qui pretend que son
poeme a ete compose d'apres son podtique."
His poetique was sufficiently detailed. It was
no collection of vague theories, but had a practical
influence on what he did. That one of his beliefs
that has been most discussed is concerned with
length. He held that a long poem does not
exist, and that books of this appearance are
really collections of independent lyrics. He
supported this theorem in an ingenious and
irrefutable manner. He writes in one of the
Marginalia : "... to appreciate thoroughly the
work of what we call genius is to possess all the

123

EDGAR ALLAN FOE

genius by which the work was produced." Now
that is a separation of the work of art from
the painted canvas or the printed book, similar
to that accomplished by Benedetto Croce, in
his Theory of ^Esthetic. It perceives that the
work of art has^a mental rather than a physical
existence, and that the canvas or the book
are only the stimuli that make possible its con
tinual renaissance. The picture or poem is a
collaboration between artist and student, and
exists only so long as this collaboration lasts.
With this clearly understood, he writes in The
Poetic Principle :

" I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves
its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating
I he soul. The value ol* the poem is in the ratio
of this elevating excitement. Slut all excite
ments are, through a psychal necessity, transient.
That degree of excitement which would entitle a
poem to be so called at all cannot be sustained
throughout a composition of any great length.
After the lapse of half an hour, at the very
utmost, it flags — fails — a revulsion ensues — and
then the poem is, in effect, and in fact, no longer
such."

He continues :

" There are, no doubt, many who have found
difficulty in reconciling the critical dictum that the
Paradise Lost is to be devoutly admired through
out, with the absolute impossibility of maintaining

124

POETRY

for it, during perusal, the amount of enthusiasm
which that critical dictum would demand.
This great work, in fact, is to be regarded as
poetical, only when, losing sight of that vital
requisite in all works of Art, Unity, we view it
merely as a series of minor poems. If, to preserve
its Unity — its totality of effect or impression—
we read it (as would be necessary) at a single
sitting, the result is but a constant alternation
of excitement and depression. After a passage of
true poetry there follows, inevitably, a passage
of platitude which no critical prejudgment can
force us to admire ; but if, upon completing the
work, we read it again, omitting the first book
(that is to say, commencing with the second), we
shall be surprised at now finding that admirable
which we had before condemned — that damnable
which we had previously so much admired. It
follows from all this that the ultimate, aggregate,
or absolute effect of even the best epic under the
sun is a nullity : and this is precisely the fact."

There is a commonly accepted distinction
between lyrical and other poems, which appears
on examination to be merely a rough quantita
tive division, that counts short poems lyrical. In
the light of this distinction it has been suggested
that Poe's arguments against long poems were
prompted by the fact that he was a lyrical, and
short-breathed poet himself. His opinion had a
broader foundation. There is no passage in his
critical work that goes to prove that he had not,

125

EDGAR ALLAN POE

and many that show that he had recognised,
like Croce in our own day, the lyrical nature of
all art. He perceived that the essential quality
of art, whether drama, poem, statue, melody or
picture, is this same lyricism that was once
attributed only to poems of a certain brevity.
Again and again in his work are indications of
a mind grappling with problems that his own
understanding set far out of reach of his country
and time. Poe fought many battles the very
dust of which could not appear to his contem
poraries.

But he could turn from questions as important
as these, and, with equal eagerness and vivacity,
discuss the details of his art. Nothing connected
with poetry was too small for his notice.

In The Rationale of Verse he attacks the
teachers of versification much as Hazlitt invaded
the pedagogic realm of English Grammar. Hazlitt
asks " Is Quackery a thing, i.e., a substance ? " in
angry comment on the usual definition of a noun.
" Versification," Poe quotes in scorn, " is the art
of arranging words into lines of correspondent
length, so as to produce harmony by the regular
alternation of syllables differing in quantity."
He proceeds to show that it is nothing of the
sort, and, in doing so, makes several notes that
let us see how carefully he has thought about
his art. * He discusses, for example, the question

126

POETRY

of synaeresis, and loudly objects to the practice
of writing silv'ry, am'rous, flow'ring, in order to
comply with the arbitrary demands of a fantastic
scheme of feet. "Blending," he says, "is the
plain English for synceresis, but there should be
no blending ; neither is an anapaest ever employed
for an iambus, or a dactyl for a trochee." He
pointed out that " there was no absolute necessity
for adhering to the precise number of syllables,
provided the time required for the whole foot
was preserved inviolate." He takes the line,

" Or laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy chair,"

and asks if we suppose it should be scanned and
pronounced

wgk f tod shake f m Rab f $aXs--€a-f sy
chairr

The scanned line above should read :

" Or laugh | *nd shake | In Rab | late' ea | ay
chair,"

more or less obvious) which any ordinary reader

can, without design, read improperly. It is the

business of the poet so to construct his line that

v the intention must be caught at once" But he

i states the general proposition that " in all

rhythms the prevalent or distinctive feet may

127

EDGAR ALLAN POE

But he could turn from questions as important
as these, and, with equal eagerness and vivacity,
discuss the details of his art. Nothing connected
with poetry was too small for his notice.

In The Rationale of Verse he attacks the
teachers of versification much as Hazlitt invaded
tl
a:
ai

length, so as to produce harmony by the regular
alternation of syllables differing in quantity."
He proceeds to show that it is nothing of the
sort, and, in doing so, makes several notes that
let us see how carefully he has thought about
his art. * He discusses, for example, the question

126

POETRY

of synaeresis, and loudly objects to the practice
of writing silv'ry, am'rous, flow'ring, in order to
comply with the arbitrary demands of a fantastic
scheme of feet. " Blending," he says, " is the '
plain English for synceresis, but there should be
no blending ; neither is an anapaest ever employed
for an iambus, or a dactyl for a trochee." He
pointed out that " there was no absolute necessity
for adhering to the precise number of syllables,
provided the time required for the whole foot
was preserved inviolate." He takes the line,

" Or laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy chair,"

and asks if we suppose it should be scanned and
pronounced

" &4a«gk | tod shaterf m Ratr flats' £a~f sy
chairr

instead of sounding Rabelais in three syllables 9

the last two being in quick time, so equalising

and at the same time delightfully varying the

foot. He was not advocating any looseness of

metre. On the contrary, he held that "that

rhythm is erroneous (at some point or other,

more or less obvious) which any ordinary reader

can, without design, read improperly. It is the

business of the poet so to construct his line that

v the intention must be caught at once" But he

i states the general proposition that " in all

• rhythms the prevalent or distinctive feet may

127

EDGAR ALLAN POE

be varied at will, and nearly at random, by the

\ occasional introduction of equivalent feet — that

I is to say, feet the sum of whose syllabic times is

i equal to the sum of the syllabic times of the dis-

Ntinctive feet." This little charter is the base of

the delicious liberties of such modern verse as

Mr. Yeats', and holds the secret of all the

gossamer swayings of those melodies that are

too delicate for definition, and tune our ears to

hear the music of the fairies.

Poe himself makes frequent appeal to it. For
example, in :

" No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town ;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently,
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free :
Up domes, up spires, up kingly halls,
Up fanes, up Babylon-like walls,
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers,
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine."

The last line of this wonderful little scrap
of music was the favourite verse of Ernest
Dowson.*

Throughout all Poe's writings on poetry blows

* See Mr. Arthur Symons' Essay, prefixed to Dowson's
Poems.

128

POETRY

a refreshing wind of sense. He defines the
object of art, and, that done, refuses to let detail
obstruct the distant vision. Details are all-im
portant, but he insists on seeing them as details,
as means, not ends, and will not allow the fly
ing dust of argument to blind him to the
purpose in relation to which alone they are
worth discussion. He writes of refrains, of
internal and triplicate rhyme, of the vivid effect
that can be wrought by the use of rhyme at
unexpected places, and, in all this, never for a
moment allows himself to generalise without
a view to practice. He upholds legitimate
liberties, because they are a help to the making
of beauty. He condemns illegitimate licence,
because it is a help to the vanity of the incom
petent. Like Dionysius of Halicarnassus, he has
no praise for the inversion of the poetasters^ .-* If
a man wishes to speak of a well, whose waters
swell amid its chill and drear confines, he must
not write

" Its confines chill and drear amid,"
and imagine that he is making poetry.

" Few things have a greater tendency than in
version to render verse feeble and ineffective. In
most cases where a line is spoken of as ' forcible,'
the force may be referred to directness of ex-j
pression. A vast majority of the passages which,
have become household through frequent quota-*

129 i

EDGAR ALLAN POE

tion owe their popularity either to this directness,
or, in general, to the scorn of ' poetic licence.' In
- , fehort, as regards verbal construction, the more
I / prosaic a poetical style is, the better."

L { In writing of the possibilities of verse, Poe
l\traces a possible history of its development from
\ihe rudimentary spondee.

" The very germ of a thought, seeking satisfac
tion in equality of sound, would result in the
construction of words of two syllables equally
accented. . . . The perception of monotone
having given rise to an attempt at its relief, the
first thought in this new direction would be
that of collating two or more words formed each
of two syllables differently accented (that is
to say, short and long) but having the same
order in each word : in other terms, of collating
two or more iambuses, or two or more trochees.
. . . The success of the experiment with the
trochees or iambuses (the one would have sug
gested the other) must have led to a trial of
dactyls or anapaests — natural dactyls or anapaests
— dactylic or anapaestic words. . . . We have
now gone so far as to suppose men constructing
indefinite sequences of spondaic, iambic, trochaic,
dactylic or anapaestic words. In extending these
sequences, they would be again arrested by the
sense of monotone. A succession of spondees
would immediately have displeased ; one of iambuses
or of trochees, on account of the variety included
within the foot itself, would have taken longer
to displease ; one of dactyls or anapaests, still

130

POETRY

longer ; but even the last, if extended very far,
must have become wearisome. The idea, first of
curtailing, and secondly, of defining the length
of a sequence, would thus at once have arisen.
Here then is the line, or verse proper. . . . Lines
being once introduced, the necessity of distinctly
defining these lines to the ear (as yet written
verse does not exist) would lead to a scrutiny of
their capabilities at their terminations ; and now
would spring up the idea of equality in sound
between the final syllables — in other words, of
rhyme. . . . That men have so obstinately and
blindly insisted, in general, even up to the present
day, in confining rhyme to the ends of lines,
when its effect is even better applicable elsewhere,
intimates, in my opinion, the sense of some
necessity in the connection of the end with rhyme
—hints that the origin of rhyme lay in a necessity
which connected it with the end — shows that
neither mere accident nor mere fancy gave rise
to the connection — points, in a word, at the very
necessity which I have suggested (that of some
mode of defining lines to the ear) as the true ,
origin of rhyme. . . . The narrowness of the
limits within which verse composed of natural
feet alone must necessarily have been confined,
would have led, after a very brief interval, to the
trial and immediate adoption of artificial feet—
that is to say, of feet not constituted each of a
single word, but two or even three words, or of
parts of words. These feet would be intermingled
with natural ones. . . . And now, in our sup
posititious progress, we have gone so far as to
exhaust all the essentialities of verse."

131

EDGAR ALLAN FOE

He proceeds to discuss such valuable inessen
tials as alliteration and refrains. The frequent
use of the refrain is characteristic of his own
poetry. It is sometimes the burden at the closes
of the stanzas that he believes was its origin, but he
notices " that further cultivation would improve
also the refrain in slightly varying the phrase at
each repetition or (as I have attempted to do in
The Raven) in retaining the phrase and varying
its application — although the latter point is not
strictly a rhythmical effect alone." In The
Raven " Nevermore " does not become the re
frain until the eighth out of the eighteen stanzas.
" Nothing more," varied in application, ends six
of them ; " evermore " the seventh. Of the
eleven stanzas that end in " nevermore," six of the
last lines are differently worded. The monotony of
the remaining five refrains, " Quoth the Raven,
' Nevermore,' " is made surprising and changeful
by the stanzas that they close. A similar method
is followed in The Bridal Ballad, and, much
more delicately, in Ulalume^here three of the
nine stanzas end with variations upon

" It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,

In the misty mid region of Weir :
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir,"

which is also a good example of Foe's economical
use of alliteration. Another form of refrain, that

132

POETRY

is no more than a reinforcing echo, is used in this
poem and in others.

" The skies they were ashen and sober ;
The leaves they were crisped and sere,

The leaves they were withering arid sere."
•
' In Ulalume it is part of the obvious design of

the stanzas, which are meant to be whispering-
galleries. Elsewhere it is made to seem a care
less accident. In the musical and wave-like flow
of speech it is as if one wave has chosen to break
before its time.

" In the greenest of our valleys

By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace —
Radiant palace — raised its head."

In the following example it is combined with
another effect that is peculiarly Poe's :

" Over the lilies there that wave
And weep above a nameless grave !
They wave : from out their fragrant tops

. Eternal dews come down in drops."

Here, beside the half-suggested echo of " wave,"
is a wholly unexpected rhyme. Poe's theory on
this point was not early developed. He writes
in The Rationale of Verse, continuing his
history :

" Finally, poets when fairly wearied with fol
lowing precedent — following it the more closely

133

EDGAR ALLAN POE

the less they perceived it in company with reason
—would adventure so far as to indulge in positive
rhyme at other points than the ends of lines.
First, they would put it in the middle of the
line ; then at some point where the multiple
would be less obvious ; then, alarmed at their
own audacity, they would undo all their work
by cutting these lines in two. And here is the
fruitful source of the infinity of ' short metre,' by
which modern poetry, if not distinguished, is at
least disgraced. It would require a high degree,
indeed, both of cultivation and of courage, on
the part of any versifier, to enable him to place
his rhymes — and let them remain — at unques-

/ tionably their best position, that of unusual and

/ unanticipated intervals."

Foe had not always thought so, and his own
verse had been so " disgraced." The lines of
Lenore, as they were first printed, were cut in
two and in three.

Oscar Wilde's Sphinx is the best example
I can remember of thus printing the lines with
reference to themselves rather than to the rhymes
that they contain.

" The river horses in the slime trumpeted when

they saw him come

Odorous with Syrian galbanum and smeared
with spikenard and with thyme."

The delicacy of the lines would be cruelly
bruised if they were printed

134

POETRY

" The river horses in the slime

Trumpeted when they saw him come
Odorous with Syrian galbanum
And smeared with spikenard and with thyme."

Examples of Poe's unanticipated rhymes are :

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each

purple curtain
Thrilled me — filled me with fantastic horrors

never felt before,"

and

?' That the wind came out of the cloud by night?
* Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee."

But although it would be interesting to follow
in detail the influence of Poe's attention to his
instrument on the music he touched from its
strings, it is perhaps more profitable to consider
them separately. I wish to turn now to a dis
cussion of the characteristics of Poe's small body
of verse. One or two curious facts at once pre
sent themselves for explanation.

Scarcely any English critics but many French
have held his poetry to be his most perfect ex
pression. There is something in it that annoys
the English reader, if ever so slightly, and that
something disappears for the foreigner. This is
itself sufficient to suggest that we must put it
down to a quality of his language. In doing so

135

EDGAR ALLAN POE

we are on very quaggy ground, since words and
their haloes of suggested meaning are the very
stuff of poetry, and in quarrelling with their use
we are very sure to be scarcely upon speaking
terms with the poems in which they are contained.
It is impossible to quarrel with a poet's wording
without quarrelling with his poetry. But there
is in much new poetry a novelty of language
that distresses us until we are accustomed to it.
Dialect poetry suffers from a similar disadvantage.
It is like seeing a new actress in an old part : a
novelty not distressing to any one unfamiliar with
the part, and not haunted by memories of the
older actresses who played it so incomparably
Well. This novelty or strangeness of language is
less keenly perceived by a foreigner. Baudelaire
and Mallarme are not shocked by it, because
they do not see it, and, in their wonderful
prose versions, it naturally disappears. We may
even have to go to these French translations
to learn the pleasure that waits for us in the
originals.

I choose an example from The Sleeper, the
-poem of all Poe's that I consider least touched
by this finger of strangeness.

" O lady bright ! can it be right,
This window open to the night ?
The wanton airs from the tree-top,
Laughingly through the lattice drop ;
136

POETRY

The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,

Flit through thy chamber in and out,

And wave the curtain canopy

So fitfully, so fearfully,

Above the closed and fringed lid

'Neath which thy slumb'ring soul lies hid,

That o'er the floor and down the wall,

Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall.

O Icidy dear\ hast thou no fear ?

Why and what art thou dreaming here ?

Sure thou art come o'er far-off seas,

A wonder to these garden trees !

Strange is thy pallor ; strange thy dress,

And this all solemn silentness ! "

I can read that now with a pleasure quite unspoilt
by the memory that once the two lines here printed
in italics pained me so that I could find no readiness
of enjoyment for the others. Incredible as now
it seems to me, I had to learn its excellence from
Mallarme's version where those two sharp repeats
(not objectionable, perhaps admirable, in them
selves) were smoothed away with the " dear " and
the " bright " that had bothered me.

" Oh ! dame brillante, vraiment est-ce bien,
cette fenetre ouverte a la nuit ? Les airs folatres
se laissent choir du haut de Farbre rieusement
par la persienne ; les airs incorporels, troupe
magique, voltigent au dedans et au dehors de la
chambre, et agitent les rideaux du baldaquin si
brusquement — si terriblement — au-dessus des
closes paupieres frangees ou ton ame en le somme

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

git cachee, que, le long du plancher et en has du
mur, comme des fantomes s'eleve et descend
1'ombre. Oh ! dame aimee, n'as-tu pas peur ?
Pourquoi ou a quoi reves-tu maintenant ici ? Sur,
tu es venue de par les mers du loin, merveille
pour les arbres de ces jardins. Etrange est ta
paleur ! etrange est ta toilette ! etrange par-dessus
tout ta longueur de cheveux, et tout ce solennel
silence ! "

And was this the poem that my impatience
hid from me ? I turned from one to the other
until at last Foe's language became my own, and
his verses flapped their dusky, jewelled wings
unsmudged before my eyes.

Poe is not alone among poets in thus not
easily becoming manifest in his own person.
Himself found the language of Wordsworth
repugnant and vulgar. A poet like Lascelles
Abercrombie is not so easily recognised as, for
example, a poet like Ernest Dowson. When
Abercrombie writes :

" And full of the very ardour out of God
Come words, lit with white fires, having past

through

The fearful hearth in Heaven where, unmixt,
Unfed, the First Beauty terribly burns.
A great flame is the world, splendid and brave ;
But words come carrying such a vehemence
Of Godhead, glowing so hot out of the holy

kiln,

138

POETRY

The place of fire whence the blaze of existence

rose,
That dulled in brightness looks the world

against them,
Even the radiant thought of man,"

he will find even worthy readers to ask themselves,
" And is this poetry ? " They may ask it more
than once, before, at last, the thing is freed for
them, or the passages of their ears for it, and
their hearts greet it with joyful acclamation.
And the reasons for this foreignness of much true
poetry are not all the same. With Abercrombie
it may be that his words are accustomed to a
high world of metaphysical thought where
we must climb to meet them. With Words
worth it may be simply the result of an ex
aggerated theory, fertile like all exaggerations.
With Poe, it may be the strange web between
himself and the America he knew, so much
further from England than that of Hawthorne
or of Emerson.

It would be possible to collect many instances
of an apparent deafness or bluntness that is
painful to those brought up in another atmo
sphere, where certain discords or worn-out
expressions are become forbidden things or
laughable accidents.

From Ulalume :

" She revels in a region of sighs."
139

EDGAR ALLAN POE

From Lenore :

" The sweet Lenore hath ' gone before/ * with
lope that flew beside."

From The Raven :

"Is there — is there balm in Gilead ? — tell me —
ell me, I implore."

There is this difficulty of language that repels
readers from his poetry. There are also some
considerations of technique. The most obvious
characteristic of Foe's verse is its tunefulness.

"It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most
nearly attains the great end for which, when
/ inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles —
the creation of supernal Beauty. It may be,
indeed, that here the sublime end is, now and
then, attained in fact. We are often made to
feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly
harp are stricken notes which cannot have been
unfamiliar to the angels."

Such nqtes are sometimes struck by Poe, as in
the bodiless Isrqfel But sometimes, also, his
rather indelicate melody makes him suffer from
the admiration of those who like tavern music,
not because, like Sir Thomas Browne, they hear
in it some echo of the music of the spheres, but

* It has been objected that the vulgarisation of the phrase
printed in quotation marks has taken place since Poe used it.
The reply is that it was actually so printed in a version of
Lenore published in Poe's lifetime.

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POETRY

because they require of music, as of poetry, that
it shall rest their heads and be a kind of tuneful
soporific. On the other hand, it brings him the
contempt of some more valuable readers, who
remember the rather heartless melody of The
Sells, and dismiss him as a jingle-monger.
Sometimes, too, words and melody do not match,
and in " marrying music to immortal verse " he
makes a mariage de convenance, and, though the
bride be lovely and the bridegroom strong, there is
no wedding guest but is conscious of the ugliness
of their union, even if he feels this ugliness only
as an uncomfortable dissatisfaction in himself.

But, in his best poems, as in his best tales, he
touches perfection. His finest stories are un
alterable from start to finish. His rare poems
are as flawless as a crystal drop, whose symmetry
the touch of a finger, be it never so delicate, would
utterly destroy. To Helen, for example :

" Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicsean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

" On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs, have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
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EDGAR ALLAN POE

" Lo ! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand !
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land ! "

Or Israfel, more than worthy of the improve
ment on the Koran with which he introduces it :

"And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings
are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all
God's creatures." — Koran.

66 In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
Whose heart-strings are a lute ;

None sing so wildly well

As the angel Israfel,

And the giddy stars (so legends tell)

Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.

" Tottering above

In her highest noon,
The enamoured moon
Blushes with love,

While, to listen, the red levin
(With the rapid Pleiads, even,
Which were seven)
Pauses in Heaven.

" And they say (the starry choir

And the other listening things)
That Israfeli's fire
Is owing to that lyre

By which he sits and sings,
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings.
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POETRY

" But the skies that angel trod,

Where deep thoughts are a duty,

Where Love's a grown-up God,
Where the Houri glances are

Imbued with all the beauty
Which we worship in a star.

" Therefore thou art not wrong,

Israfeli, who despisest
An unimpassioned song ;
To thee the laurels belong,

Best bard, because the wisest :
Merrily live, and long !

" The ecstasies above

With thy burning measures suit :
Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,
With the fervor of thy lute :
Well may the stars be mute !

" Yes, Heaven is thine ; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours ;
Our flowers are merely — flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.

" If I could dwell
Where Israfel

Hath dwelt, and he where 1,
He might not sing so wildly well

A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell

From my lyre within the sky."

Some of his most famous poems seem to me
among his least successful. The Raven, for

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

1 example, a tour de force, a skilful piece of tech
nique, is a well-shaped body that has never
had a soul to lose. In Ulalume skill almost
swamps inspiration. Annabel Lee, another
work of his last years, may have been spoilt for
me by painstaking young ladies at their mothers'
pianos. I cannot read it with pleasure, though
I find myself repeating some of its lines. I find
his best poetry in the revisions of his youthful
work, like The Sleeper, and 77/6 City in the Sea,

. and the poems printed above.

It seems, on first observing it, strange that the
note of horror that sounds so often in the tales
should be almost absent from the poems. There
is, certainly, The Conqueror Worm, and, perhaps,
The Haunted Palace: but the one belongs to
Ligeia, and the other to The Fall of the House
of Usher. The gloom of the poems is of a less
various texture than that of the prose. I believe
that the difference is due to a rather curious
misconception as to beauty itself. In other parts
of this book we see how far Foe walked on the
right track in eliminating from the beautiful any
kind of passion, in showing that beauty is a con
dition and not an emotion, in asking that poetry
should aim only at securing this condition, and
not allow itself to be deflected by any considera
tion of didacticism or other side issue. Here we
must notice that he went too far, and narrowed

144

POETRY

the scope of his verse by rejecting, as incapable
o/ beauty, a great mass of material that his own
prose showed need not be anything of the kind.
He writes : " The author who aims at the purely
beautiful in a prose tale is labouring at a great
disadvantage. For Beauty can be better treated
in the poem. Not so with terror, or passion, or
horror, or a multitude of other such points."
Elsewhere he still more clearly betrays himself:

66 We shall reach, however, more immediately
a distinct conception of what the true Poetry
is, by mere reference to a few of the simple
elements which induce in the Poet himself the
true poetical effect. He recognises the ambrosia,
which nourishes his soul, in the bright orbs that
shine in Heaven, in the volutes of the flower, in
the clustering of low shrubberies, in the waving
of the grain-fields, in the slanting of the tall,
Eastern trees, in the blue distance of mountains,
in the grouping of clouds, in the twinkling of
half-hidden brooks, in the gleaming of silver
rivers, in the repose of sequestered lakes, in the
star-mirroring depths of lonely wells. He per
ceives it in the songs of birds, in the harp of
^Eolus, in the sighing of the night-wind, in the
repining voice of the forest, in the surf that
complains to the shore, in the fresh breath of the
woods, in the scent of the violet, in the volup
tuous perfume of the hyacinth, in the suggestive
odour that comes to him at eventide from far-
distant, undiscovered islands, over dim oceans,
illimitable and unexplored. He owns it in all

145 K

EDGAR ALLAN POE

noble thoughts, in all unworldly motives, in all
holy impulses, in all chivalrous, generous, and
self-sacrificing deeds. He feels it in the beauty
of woman, in the grace of her step, in the lustre
of her eye, in the melody of her voice, in her soft
laughter, in her sigh, in the harmony of the rust
ling of her robes. He deeply feels it in her
winning endearments, in her burning enthusiasms,
in her gentle charities, in her meek and devotional
endurances ; but above all — ah ! far above all-
he kneels to it, he worships it in the faith, in the
purity, in the strength, in the altogether divine
majesty of her love."

There is more than a hint here of declamation
and an impressible audience, but, taken with the
sentences quoted before it, it provides the key
we seek. What is it but a catalogue of lovely
accidents, from which all that we have not grown
accustomed, in our loose way, to call beautiful,
is excluded ? With such a conception of the
inspirations of poetry, counting them distinct
from those of prose, it is not surprising that Poe's
excursions as a poet seemed visits to Arcady.
He never returned to his youthful poems without
the feelings of a man remembering the Golden
Age. He brought to their revision the know
ledge that prose work had given him, and made
no changes that were not for the better. But he
never let his poetry follow his development. It
represented only one of his aspects. He would

146

POETRY

keep it always a charming child, or a dreaming
Eros that no Psyche could wake with burning oil.

" Rafael made a century of sonnets,
Made and wrote them in a certain volume
Dinted with the silver-pointed pencil
Else he only used to draw Madonnas."

Poe's verse was to the prose-writer what
Rafael's sonnets were to the painter, that other
art, not his, and yet particularly his own, cherished
for a supreme purpose. In it, to paraphrase
Browning, he gained the artist's joy, missed the
man's sorrow, finding the work more complex,
and so, to such as he, a greater pleasure, and
fixing in it, and refixing in revision, those
moments that seemed so fair as to be foreign to
his life.

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ANALYSIS

TWO sorts of men spend time on riddles : fools
and the very clever ; fools because, in sitting
before a conundrum, aimlessly puzzling their
brains and occasionally chancing on a solution,
they gain a specious sense of intellectual activity ;
the very clever because they find in acrostics and
such things an outlet for that one of their
faculties that moves most easily with its own
momentum, that works ceaselessly in spite of
themselves, and, like the grindstone of a mill,
groans for material on which to exercise itself.
This faculty is analysis, a tool in the equipment
of all artists. So important is it to them that it
would not be surprising to learn that the con
verse were also true, and that all analysts were
capable of art. If it were discovered that
Euclid had written poetry beside those wonder
ful thirteen books, there would be no more
incongruity in the double accomplishment than
in Poe's writing Silence : a Fable as well as
The Purloined Letter and his article pn cryp
tograms. There would be no incongruity at all.

151

EDGAR ALLAN FOE

The same faculty that produced the one made
also possible the other. Analysis is the art of
disentangling, and the muddled skein of our
feelings *and images must first be disentangled
before we can knit together the firm plait of a
lyrical expression. Analysis is more than obser
vation ; it clears the moss from the pebble and
lets its colouring appear, and with careful fingers
frees the honeysuckle from its surrounding
brambles. It makes selection possible, though
the poet, conscious of what he does, would
say more truly that it helps him to reject,
to throw aside the arbitrary, the inessential,
leaving, perhaps, gaps that miraculously fill
themselves like the holes we make when we
scoop a floating piece of dirt from a still pool
of water.

This faculty was extraordinarily developed in
Poe, and overflowed its legitimate place in his
creative work. It had its share in laying upon
him the curse of self-consciousness for which we
value him so highly. It was, at last, like fire
who is better as a slave than as a master, to rise
up and battle with his imagination instead of
doing its loyal best to aid it. He found, like
Brockden Brown, whose books very probably
influenced him, that " curiosity, like virtue, is its
own reward," or, at least, that the delight of the
analysis that curiosity inspires is sufficient as a

152

ANALYSIS

motive for itself. His exercise of it became as
necessary to him as absinthe to the absinthe-
drinker ; it was greedy of his energies, and grew
in greed with his efforts to satisfy it. He might
have cried with Faustus : " Sweet Analytics, 'tis
thou hast ravished me ! " The same faculty that
made possible the lyrical excellence of his best
works, and gave his critical articles their most
valuable paragraphs, spoilt Eureka, and urged
him to the solution of cryptograms and the study
of handwriting ; and, turning from the solution of
puzzles to their manufacture, set him to the com
position of acrostic sonnets and to the invention
of tales of analysis in which it becomes the material
as well as the tool of art, the excitement of
reasoning being substituted for that of love or
terror.

There is a kind of insolence in the making of
acrostics when one might be making poetry. It
is an impertinence in the face of the gods, as if a
man running a race were to stop for a moment
before the judges' stand, and fold a cocked hat
from a piece of paper, before resuming the
contest whose result they are to decide. The
excellence of the cocked hat — and most of Poe's
exercises in this kind exhibit an almost deplorable
cleverness — does not in the least affect our half-
admiring, half-resentful impatience of his having
dared to fold it in such circumstances.

153

EDGAR ALLAN POE

" ' Seldom we find/ says Solomon Don Dunce,

6 Half aji idea in the profoundest sonnet.
Through all the flimsy things we see at once
As easily as through a Naples bonnet —
Trash of all trash ! How can a lady don it ?
Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuff,
Owl- downy nonsense that the faintest puff

Twirls into trunk-paper the while you con it.'
And veritably, Sol is right enough.
The general, tuckermanities are arrant
Bubbles, ephemeral and $o transparent ;

But this is, now, you may depend upon it,
Stable, opaque, immortal — all by dint
Of the dear names that lie concealed within't."

That is one of Poe's cocked hats. To unfold
it, take the first letter in the first line, the second
in the second line, the third in the third, and so
on, until the fourteen letters spread out into a
name that, but for the insolent fun of it (though
it reads dully to us), might have been better
written so than in these fourteen empty verses.

There is something of the same flippant serious
ness in the analysis of Maelzel's Chess-Player, an
automaton very neatly and unnecessarily pulled
to pieces with the help of Sir David Brewster.
Time is wasted just as earnestly in the still
cleverer essay on solving cryptograms. Only,
when we turn from all these exercises (which
may have served a purpose in turning play to
bread and butter) and read the four tales in which

154

ANALYSIS

Poe's analysis snatched an independent aesthetic
value, and turned into a kind of poetry, have we
the satisfaction of feeling that there is no more a
question of cocked hats, but of the business of
the day.

These four tales are The Murders in the Rue
Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, The
Purloined Letter, and 'The Gold Bug. Of
these, The Gold Bug, though not the first
written, is not free from elements of another
kind. The law-court atmosphere of evidence and
deduction is shaken by breaths of romance. The
skull and cross-bones of Captain Kidd wave on
a black flag before our eyes, and the process of
analysis is carried out in a lonely hut and in a
forest of tropical trees. When the analysis is
over, the tale closes on a note of different
character, a hollow knell, so carefully sounded as
almost to make us forget the original interest of
the tale in a moment of romantic speculation.
" Perhaps a couple of blows with a mattock were
sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the
pit ; perhaps it required a dozen — who shall tell ? "
For some reason or other Poe was afraid to trust
himself to the mechanism he had already proved.
He needed flesh and blood to steady his belief in
the thin steel framework and infinitesimal wires
of his machine.

^ But in the other tales, the trilogy of Dupin, he

155

EDGAR ALLAN POE

gaily cast off his safe anchor in romance, and
adventured on the untried wings of curiosity and
analysis. In the beginning he was perhaps over-
conscious of the novelty of his experiment. The
first eleven pages of The Murders in the Rue
Morgue are taken up with an elaborate account
of the new motive power, almost as if he were
reassuring himself. He has to talk of analysis,
and then of its personification in Dupin, of the
motive power and then of the engine in which it
is to be used, before, in the story itself, he gives,
as it were, a trial and a specimen flight. The
Mystery of Marie Roget has scarcely a page of
introduction. There is a short reference to the
former flight, and the inventor is in the air again.
The Purloined Letter is without preliminaries.
Confident that the machine will bear him, he
rises instantly from the ground.

It is possible to illustrate the method and
design of this machine by showing the model,
the small example of analysis that' Poe used in
his introduction to the first of his three experi
ments. The specimen will cover a few pages
that can ill be spared, but will repay us by being
at hand for reference. It is, indeed, a complete
tale in itself, a working model designed for
examination.

" We were strolling one night down a long
dirty street, in the vicinity of the Palais Royal.

156

ANALYSIS

Being both, apparently, occupied with thought,
neither of us had spoken a syllable for fifteen
minutes at least. All at once Dupin broke
forth with these words :

" ' He is a very little fellow, that's true, and
would do better for the Theatre des Varietes?

" ' There can be no doubt of that,' I replied
unwittingly, and not at first observing (so much
had I been absorbed in reflection) the extra
ordinary manner in which the speaker had
chimed in with my meditations. In an instant
afterward I recollected myself, and my astonish
ment was profound.

" ' Dupin,' said I, gravely, ' this is beyond my
comprehension. I do not hesitate to say that I
am amazed, and can scarcely credit my senses.
How was it possible you should know I was

thinking of ? ' Here I paused, to ascertain

beyond a doubt whether he really knew of whom
I thought.

" ' Of Chantilly,' said he, ' why do you pause ?
You were remarking to yourself that his diminu
tive figure unfitted him for tragedy.'

" This was precisely what had formed the
subject of my reflections. Chantilly was a
quondam cobbler of the Rue St. Denis, who,
becoming stage-mad, had attempted the role of
Xerxes, in Cr^billon's tragedy so called, and been
notoriously pasquinaded for his pains.

" ' Tell me, for Heayen's sake,' I exclaimed,
' the method — if method there is — by which you
have been enabled to fathom my soul in this
matter.' In fact I was even more startled than
I would have been willing to express.

157

EDGAR ALLAN POE

(( 6

It was the fruiterer/ replied my friend,
'who brought you to the conclusion that the
mender of soles was not of sufficient height for
Xerxes et id genus omne.'

" ' The fruiterer ! — you astonish me — I know
no fruiterer whomsoever.'

" ' The man who ran up against you as we
entered the street — it may have been fifteen
minutes ago.'

" I now remembered that, in fact, a fruiterer,
carrying upon his head a large basket of apples,
had nearly thrown me down, by accident, as we
passed from the Rue C into the thorough
fare where we stood ; but what this had to do
with Chantilly I could not possibly understand.

" There was not a particle of cliarlatanerie
about Dupin. ' I will explain,' he said, ' and
that you may comprehend all clearly, we will
first retrace the course of your meditations, from
the moment in which I spoke to you until that
of the rencontre with the fruiterer in question.
The larger links of the chain run thus — Chantilly,
Orion, Dr. Nichols, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the
street stones, the fruiterer.'

" There are few persons who have not, at some
period of their lives, amused themselves in re
tracing the steps by which particular conclusions
of their own minds have been attained. The
occupation is often full of interest, and he who
attempts it for the first time is astonished by the
apparently illimitable distance and incoherence
between the starting-point and the goal. What,
then, must have been my amazement when I
heard the Frenchman speak what he had just

158

ANALYSIS

spoken, and when I could not help acknow
ledging that he had spoken the truth. He
continued :

" ' We had been talking of horses, if 1 remember

aright, just before leaving the Rue C . This

was the last subject we discussed. As we crossed
into the street, a fruiterer, with a large basket
upon his head, brushing quickly past us, thrust
you upon a pile of paving-stones collected at a
spot where the causeway is undergoing repair.
You stepped upon one of the loose fragments,
slipped, slightly strained your ankle, appeared
vexed or sulky, muttered a few words, turned to
look at the pile, and then proceeded in silence.
I was not particularly attentive to what you did,
but observation has become with me, of late, a
species of necessity.

" ' You kept your eyes upon the ground —
glancing, with a petulant expression at the holes
and ruts in the pavement (so that I saw you
were still thinking of the stones), until we reached
the little alley called Lamartine, which has been
paved, by &way of experiment, with the over
lapping and riveted blocks. Here your counten
ance brightened up, and perceiving your lips
move, I could not doubt that you murmured the
word " stereotomy," a term very affectedly applied
to this species of pavement. 1 knew that you
could not say to yourself " stereotomy " without
being brought to think of atomies, and thus of
the theories of Epicurus ; and since, when we
discussed this subject not very long ago, I
mentioned to you how singularly, yet with how
little notice, the vague guesses of that noble

159

EDGAR ALLAN POE

Greek had met with confirmation in the late
nebular cosmogony, I felt that you could not
avoid casting your eyes upwards to the great
nebula in Orion, and I certainly expected that
you would do so. You did look up, and I was
now assured that I had correctly followed your
steps. But in that bitter tirade upon Chantilly,
which appeared in yesterday's Musee, the satirist,
making some disgraceful allusions to the cobbler's
change of name upon assuming the buskin, quoted
a Latin line about which we have often conversed.
I mean the line :

" * Perdidit antiquum litera prima sonum.

" ' I had told you that this was in reference to
Orion, formerly written Urion ; and, from
certain pungencies connected with this explana
tion 1 was aware that you could not have
forgotten it. It was clear, therefore, that you
would not fail to combine the two ideas of Orion
and Chantilly. That you did combine them I
saw by the character of the smile which passed
over your lips. You thought of the poor cobbler's
immolation. So far, you had been stooping in
your gait ; but now I saw you draw yourself up
to your full height. I was then sure that you
reflected upon the diminutive figure of Chantilly.
At this point 1 interrupted your meditations to
remark that as, in fact, he was a very little fellow
that Chantilly, he would do better at the Theatre
des Varietes"

The interest of that anecdote is the same as
the interest of the three tales to which it is a

160

ANALYSIS

prelude. It does not consist in dulled waiting
upon a solution, but in " a pleasurable activity
of mind." It is a kind of gymnastic with which
Poe exercised his analytical powers, and it is also
something more. Poe's work is difficult to treat
of as a whole, because of his tendency to the
segregation of particular moods of his mind.
This separation of moods is common to all men
of lyrical expression ; but, whereas with most
artists the moods separated are temperamental,
the faculty of analysis assisting the disentangling
of one mood from another, Poe goes further, and
separates analysis itself. He, at bottom a critic
and thinker, wore several masks in turn, and a
study of him can only hope to reach the truth by
the examination of all these masks as circum
stantial evidence. But of them all, analysis is
the one that, for good or evil, he least readily
laid aside, the only one that completely obscures
his possession of other dominoes. The puzzles,
the acrostics, the cryptograms, show how much
waste energy this mask allowed him to spend.
The anecdote we have just read will show how
he was able to turn this faculty of his brain into
the material for lyrical expression.
/Tn those tales Poe does not ask us to be sur
prised at the cleverness of Dupin. The little
story I have quoted tells us nothing about Dupin
but his name, yet our ignorance does not in the

161 L

EDGAR ALLAN POE

least affect our enjoyment. We are amazed, not
at Dupin's subtlety, but at the human mind.
Dupin is not an analyst, but analysis. It is for
that reason that some people have complained of
his lack of individuality.) They might as well
complain of Nicolete in the old French tale.
Dupin and Nicolete are not individual but univer
sal. Not that I would suggest any coarse alle
gory in either case /although Poe has been very
careful, in the few details he cares to give us, to
start no false hare of personality, and to leave
Dupin free to be what he is. Analysis, for
example, loves the dark. So does Dupin. " His
manner at these moments (the exercise of his
analytic abilities) was frigid and abstract ; his
eyes were vacant in expression ; while his voice,
usually a rich tenor, ran into a treble which
would have sounded petulantly but for the de-
liberateness and entire distinctness of the enuncia
tion." Is not that a vivid observation of the
physical expression of analysis itself ? And then
again : " Observing him in these moods, I often
dwelt meditatively upon the old philosophy of
the Bi-Part Soul, and amused myself with the
fancy of a double Dupin — the creative and the
resolvent." And, finally, " There was not a
particle of charlatanerie about Dupin." I can
imagine Euclid saying the same in a hymn of
praise to his geometry. " I will explain," he

1G2

ANALYSIS

said, and Foe's three stories are a lyrical per
sonification of the explaining faculties of the
mind.

The abstract can never be the material of art.
It has already passed beyond particular expres
sion into the regions of thought. It has left
feeling behind. It can no longer lose in transla
tion, since it is practically independent of the
words that are used to note it down. But Foe
is not moved here by an abstract idea, fc Dupin
is no wooden dummy chosen to illustrate such
and such abstract principles. Instead, the reason
ing powers of a mind that keenly enjoyed them
have flowered suddenly into something concrete
and particular) The abstract Love has become
the concrete Nicolete, who cast a shadow in the
moonlit streets of Beaucaire. A new moment
of the unconscious human life (unconscious of
itself even in its moments of careful reason) has
been isolated and made real. We have another
scrap of conscious life in which our brains can
shake their weights off and be lucidly alive.
Many analysts, geometricians and draughts-
players must have surprisedly awakened to them
selves in reading those three tales.

Let us now examine the architecture of these
stories, in which, perhaps more clearly than in
his other work, Foe's skill in narrative is manifest.
In the anecdote we have read, the solution and

163

EDGAR ALLAN POE

the question are presented first and together, and
the interest is free from any anxiety to know the
end. It lies simply in retracing the ^steps by
which the solution was attained, f In The
Murders in the Rue Morgue the question is
first posed, with all the evidence, over which the
reader's mind runs in hopeless emulation of the
power that is then applied to it before his eyes.
The solution follows, and finally the solution and
the steps by wMchit has been found are one by
one explained, i iln The Mystery of Marie
Eoget the question is first stated, followed by
the evidence, interspersed with examples of false
reasoning which are disposed of by Dupin, who
works through them to the clue, which, as he
makes clear, is itself a solution. / /In The Pur
loined Letter the question is first posed, with
all its difficulties. Then there is a proof of its
solution (in the production of the missing letter),
and finally an account of the methods whereby
the problem has been solved. { It is plain that
the form of the problems is sufficiently various.
The constant factor in the reader's intellectual
enjoyment lies (apart from wonder, which cer
tainly counts a little) in the swift and bracing
gymnastic of following the mental processes that
lead to the solutions. Our knowledge of the
solutions does 'not in the least affect it. Our
aesthetic pleasure, dependent first upon the lyrical

164

ANALYSIS

and concrete inspiration of the whole, is due to
the perfection of the conditions under which our
mental gymnastic takes place. These tales share
the conditions of beauty that belong to Euclid's
propositions. There is nothing in them that is
unnecessary, nothing merely baulking, no dead
matter. In each case question and^answer are
accurately balanced with each other. 1 The details
of question and answer come in the right order ;
that is to say, in the order most apt for the
particular tale.l Our aesthetic enjoyment, then,
is partly dependent upon plot, an element whose
importance in story-telling Poe was one of the
first to perceive. Plot does not mean the posing
of a question and the keeping of its answer until
the end of the story, although in the cruder
forms of detective fiction it does manifest its
presence in this way. We find ourselves, as
so often throughout the book, turning to Poe's
own statements of aesthetic theory :

" Plot is very imperfectly understood, and has
never been rightly defined. Many persons regard
it as mere complexity of incident. In its most
rigorous acceptation, it is that from which no
component atom can be removed, and in which none
of the component atoms can be displaced, without
ruin to the whole; and although a sufficiently
good plot may be constructed, without attention
to the whole rigour of this definition, still it is
the definition, which the artist should always keep

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

in view, and always endeavour to consummate in
his works."

Many of Poe's best stories fulfil this definition's
demands, though in few is their fulfilment so
easily seen as in these. Plot, like composition in
a picture, is the most recognisable mark of the
analytic spirit's presence in creation. Reading
again that part of Poe's definition which he has
underlined, it is clear that there is no real differ
ence between this manifestation of analysis and
that which occurs in every work of art, even if it
be without " plot " obvious as such. The same
power that separates the contradictory, and
rejects the irrelevant in the careful tending of
a growing inspiration, helps the artist to this
ruder proof of the unity of his work with itself.
In this sense there is plot in all works of art. It
is indeed a condition of their being. And it is
wise to remember this while following Poe in his
discussion of plot as the more plainly geometrical
element of construction. He contrasts it with
the less obvious manifestations of itself, as a man
might well contrast the steel girders and ropes
of a suspension bridge, beautiful in their direct
explanation of themselves, written clear against
the sky, with the solid curves of an older bridge
whose lines of stress and strain are fleshed in
stone, and overgrown with moss and fern.

We must think of this when he says :

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ANALYSIS

" Plot, however, is at best an artificial effect,
requiring, like music, not only a natural bias, but
long cultivation of taste for its full appreciation ;
. . . the absence of plot can never be critically
regarded as a defect ; although its judicious use,
in all cases aiding and in no case injuring other
effects, must be regarded as of a very high order
of merit."

Forgetting it, this paragraph would be rubbish.
Remembering it, we see that he points out that
a delight in Bach is less facile than a delight in
Wagner, and that in all cases construction is vain
without an end. The bridge, iron or stone, must
cross a river. The work of art must begin with
an inspiration.

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METAPHYSICS

" METAPHYSICS," I learn from a respectable
dictionary, are " that science which seeks to
trace the branches of human knowledge to their
first principles in the constitution of our nature,
or to find what is the nature of the human
mind and its relation to the external world ; the
science that seeks to know the ultimate grounds
of being or what it is that really exists, em
bracing both psychology and ontology." Now
psychology is the science of the soul and ontology
that of being, and these were Poe's preoccupa
tions rather than the more easily legible sciences
of manners and appearances. 1 can fairly give
this title to a chapter on the character of his
researches and in particular on his book Eureka
and a few of the dialogues, Monos and Una,
Eiros and Charmion, and The Power of Words,
in which these researches bear aesthetic fruit.

We must beware lest in reading these things
we forget, as he found it too easy to forget him
self, the character of the man who wrote them.
We must not mistake him, as he sometimes

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

mistook himself, for a logician or a natural
philosopher. /Toe was a man for whom abstract
ideas very readily disintegrated into impressions^
He was at times an able acrobat on the trapezes
and ladders of reasoning, but he was not a man
for whom abstract reasoning could itself take on
an aesthetic quality, as with Schopenhauer or
Benedetto Croce, whose Theory of ^Esthetic
is itself a beautiful work. This does not con
tradict what was said in the last chapter. In
the analytical tales he is finding beauty not in
reasoning but in the reasoning mood. I pointed
out there that analysis was the faculty in Poe
which most readily obscured his possession of
others. He seems almost to leave the bulk of
himself behind when he comes to argue, and,
consequently, his arguments, forgiven for their
contexts, are always disappointing. This may
seem ungracious speech of a man whose work is
so fruitful in the minds of other men, whose work
owes much of its importance to the ideas that
underlie it. But we must remember that the
ideas that have altered the attitude of artists of
their art were more properly close observations
on the nature and end of that art, due less to
abstract reasoning than to a vivid and concrete
perception of particular things. They are the
observations of a man, himself an artist, made in
those moments when, after close business upon

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METAPHYSICS

his table, he lifts his head to look out at the
stars in sudden enlightenment about what he
has actually been doing. They are different in
origin and kind from his reasonings on the cosmos
engendered by reading Herschel on astronomy.

In Poe's mind, I repeat, an abstract idea very
readily disintegrated into impressions. It would,
perhaps, be more exact to say that an abstract
idea very readily set a direction to loose impres
sions already floating there, and so gave them
the vitality that made them expressive./ Poe
leaps boldly from a scientific to a spiritual truth,
often, with sublime carelessness, kicking aside
the ladders of reason as he flies by a swifter path/
There is an excellent example in the conclusion
of The Power of Words :

" AGATHOS. I have spoken to you, Oinos, as
to a child of the fair Earth which lately perished,
of impulses upon the atmosphere of the Earth.

" OINOS. You did.

" AGATHOS. And while I thus spoke, did there / ^
not cross your mind some thought of the physical
power of words ? Is not every word an impulse
on the air ?

" OINOS. But why, Agathos, do you weep—
and why, oh, why do your wings droop as we hover
above this fair star, which is the greenest and yet
most terrible of all we have encountered in our
flight? Its brilliant flowers look like a fairy
dream, but its fierce volcanoes like the passions
of a turbulent heart.

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

" AGATHOS. They are ! They are ! This wild
star — it is now three centuries since, with clasped
hands, and with streaming eyes, at the feet of my
beloved, 1 spoke it, with a few passionate
sentences, into birth. Its brilliant flowers are
the dearest of all unfulfilled dreams, and its
raging volcanoes are the passions of the most
turbulent and unhallowed of hearts."

The abstract idea that a spoken sound
communicates a deathless vibration to the atmo
sphere is here cast suddenly aside for the bolder
assumption that these vibrations are creative of
something correspondent to the meaning of the
sound, an assumption that no reasoning could
uphold. Arid yet, as we read that final paragraph
we feel that it is true, as true as " Cinderella," or
the story of the mermaid who danced on knife-
. blades and was turned into the foam of the sea.
The truth of reason has been abandoned for the
more luminous truth of poetry.

In plunging into the scientific speculation of
Eureka, Poe provides us with the spectacle of
a man, accustomed to autocracy in his own
domain, flinging himself into another arid con
fidently expecting from it an equal pliability and
obedience. We laugh at professors who turn
to writing sonnets. We cannot laugh at Poe
because, on the hard rocks of the professors' world,
he left so much of the gold he had brought with
him from his own.

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METAPHYSICS

Sometimes, usually after these excursions,
when it was already too late, he felt himself a
foreigner, or at least had some misgiving about
his right in that world. And then he would
think of what he had done, perhaps remembering
the scraps of gold, and become confident again.
Such a mixture of doubt and belief dictated the
preface to Eureka :

66 To the few who love me and whom I love"
—to those who feel rather than to those who
think — to the dreamers and those who put faith
in dreams as the only realities — I offer this book
of Truths, not in the character of Truth-Teller,
but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth,
constituting it true. To these I present the com
position as an Art-Product alone, — let us say as
a Romance ; or, if I be not urging too lofty a
claim, as a Poem.

" What I here propound is true : therefore it
cannot die ; or if by any means it be now trodden
down so that it die, it will rise again to the Life
Everlasting.

" Nevertheless, it is as a Poem only that I
wish this work to be judged after I am dead."

That little piece of prose has always seemed

; to me a very moving embodiment of a great

man's hesitation. It is hope almost throttled by

fear and for that very reason raising its voice to

I an unnatural pitch. He would have liked to

quote the words of Kepler from the letter in the

175

EDGAR ALLAN POE

book : " / can afford to wait a century for readers
when God himself has waited six thousand years
for an observer. I triumph. I have stolen the
golden secret of the Egyptians. I will indulge my
sacred fury" But he dared not burn his boats.
He asks us to consider Eureka as a poem
or a romance, a work of art not science. It is
indeed a De Rerum Natura, and a comparison
with Lucretius is the readiest way to an under
standing of Poe's failure. Lucretius, like Poe,
is full of facts of science imperfectly understood.
Long arguments about the void in things tempt
a modern thinker to regard the work as vain that
is based on such conceptions. But in Lucretius
the spirit of the argument is the same as that
which gloriously greets the creative spirit of the
earth :

" ^Eneadum genetrix, hominum divomque

voluptas,

alma Venus, cseli subter labentia signa
quse mare navigerum, quse terras frugiferentes
concelebras, per te quoniam genus omne ani-

mantum

concipitur visitque exortum lumina solis
te, dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubila ceeli
adventumque tuum, tibi suavis dasdala tellus
summittit flores, tibi rident sequora ponti
placatumque nitet diffuso lumine caelum."

All is of a piece, and the outworn science
retains its power over us in the veins of poetry

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METAPHYSICS

in which it flows, the white and scarlet cor
puscles making blood between them. In Poe,
this is not so. The reds and the whites are
gathered in separate camps, and the whites have
an unfortunate predominance. The two do not
mingle. The book is at war with itself, and,
consequently, fails as a work of art. It is not
to the point to pick holes in Poe's knowledge of
science, or even in the conduct of his argument,
though several of his critics have thought that
in so doing they were exposing the weakness
of the book. Lucretius is all wrong, but his
poem is all right. Even if Poe's science were
invulnerable, it would still be the Achilles' heel
of his work, because it is at war with himself, at
war with the poem he is trying to write, and so
no more than dead matter whose existence eats
like a canker into the vitality of what is left.

But, in writing Eureka Poe went near the
making of a great book. It was not mere
fanaticism that led Baudelaire to translate it
entire. It is not a poem, because it is a failure
and every poem is a success. But it is a book
whose patches of vitality are luminous with their
special kind of truth, a lump of worthless rock
with glittering gold caught in its crevices, a
cluster of glow-worms on a piece of barren land.
And these bright sparks must be gathered by
any one who would understand the path Poe

177 M

EDGAR ALLAN POE

trod between earth and the stars. Moments of
reasoning, and, far more often, fragments of
poetry that have flung off reason to live in their
own right, help us to see, perhaps more clearly
than himself, since we are at a greater distance,
what this man sought, and what was the cha
racter of his search.

In the letter that Poe prefixes to his argument,
the letter written in the year two thousand eight
hundred and forty-eight, and cruelly smudged
with some of the worst of his attempted jokes,
there is the promise of a book that would indeed
have been the poem that Eureka was not.
In the prefatory note, Poe had dedicated his
book "to those who feel rather than to those
who think — to the dreamers and those who put
faith in dreams as the only realities." Here he
exclaims against the limitation of truth to what
is arrived at by reasoning, or to collections of
fact, " the impalpable, titillating Scotch snuff of
detail." " No man," says the author of the letter,
" dared to utter a truth for which he felt himself
indebted to his soul alone." He points out, on
the one hand, that reasoning is founded upon
axioms and so upon nothing, and, on the other,
that the " diggers and pedlars of minute facts "
substitute natural science for metaphysics. He
calls the philosophers to task for their " pompous
and infatuate proscription of all other roads to

178

METAPHYSICS

Truth than the two narrow and crooked paths—
the one of creeping and the other of crawling —
to which, in their ignorant perversity, they have
dared to confine the Soul — the Soul which loves
nothing so well as to soar in those regions ot 3
illimitable intuition which are utterly incognisant
of 'path'!" Then, like a flash, follows this
sentence : " Is it not wonderful that they should
have failed to deduce from the works of God the
vitally momentous consideration that a perfect
consistency can be nothing but an absolute truth?"
Is not that the secret of art, the explanation of
its value to mankind, far above that of the things,
colours and lines that it may happen to represent
or use ? Is not that the idea whose amplifica
tion is Benedetto Croce's theory of aesthetic?
Would not Blake in reading it have heard that
the sons of the morning were shouting in heaven ?
That it was not an accident, whose worth and
meaning Foe had not recognised, is proved by
this other paragraph from near the end of the
book :

"... And, in fact, the sense of the symmetrical
is an instinct which may be depended upon with
an almost blindfold reliance. It is the poetical \.
essence of the Universe — of the Universe which,
in the supremeness of its symmetry, is but the
most sublime of poems. Now, symmetry and
consistency are convertible terms ; thus Poetry

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

and Truth are one. A thing is consistent in the
ratio of its truth, true in the ratio of its con
sistency. A perfect consistency r, / repeat, can be
nothing but an absolute truth. We may take it
for granted, then, that Man cannot long or widely
err, if he suffer himself to be guided by his
poetical, which I have maintained to be his
truthful, in being his symmetrical, instinct. He
must have a care, however, lest, in pursuing too
heedlessly the superficial symmetry of forms and
motions, he leave out of sight the really essential
symmetry of the principles which determine and
control them."

How near in these few sentences, as in a

hundred other places in his work, Poe comes to

the enunciation of the truth that in the absolute

unity of a work of art, a poem, or a picture, is

\ an escape from the general flux of unconscious

s living into the conscious and absolute life that

lies above it.

If, as he almost promised, he had kept to this
path, or, rather, independence of path, towards
the truth, Eureka might have been a smaller
and better book, consistent with its author and
with itself, and so really a poem that we could
receive more graciously than, as I seem to be
doing, by putting one hand behind us and only
timidly advancing the other.

But the bulk of Eureka is of a different
texture, and, if we are to win any of the riches

180

METAPHYSICS

that are hung haphazard upon it, we must under
stand why we are not bound to consider it the
most important, as it is the largest, part of the
book. It has usually been so considered, and
Poe has suffered in the resulting interpretation.
More than one of his biographers, unable to
distinguish dead from living flesh, has talked
about Poe's" materialistic philosophy," and about
Eureka as the book in which it has been
imperfectly expressed. Nothing could be further
from the truth. In every case where Poe's nature
finds a lyrical expression, by which alone such
a nature can be judged, his philosophy is of a
consistent colour, quite different from the hard,
sharp blacks and whites that a superficial reading
of Eureka, that gave most prominence to the
unsuccessful and inessential parts, would possibly
suggest.

We have noticed in the last chapter the
exuberance of Poe's analytical faculty. We saw
that he had more of it than was sufficient to the
artist's purposes. We have seen him spending it
in solving cryptograms, and in writing acrostics.
Particularly we have seen him turn it to beauty
in such tales as The Murders in the Rue
Morgue, and The Purloined Letter. What
could be a more natural misfortune than that,
pleased with his power of reasoning from data,
sure since arbitrary and his own, he should be

181

EDGAR ALLAN POE

over-confident in argument on data that he had
at second hand, and that he should mistake its
athletic exercise for something almost as trust
worthy as his power of dreams. There comes to
many men a period when reason seems in itself
so strange and admirable as to usurp in them
selves the thrones of those faculties that, unlike
reason, have characters peculiar to their owners
and therefore valuable. What happened to
Shelley at eighteen happened to Poe at thirty-
eight, unfortunately synchronising with and con
tradicting his furthest development, instead of
only spoiling youthful work that he might have
been glad to see forgotten. It would be possible,
in making a new mythology of the brain, to
picture Godwin (not the author of Caleb
Williams but the author of Political Justice)
as a personification of the hard and active god
who makes the brain an enemy of the heart, and
refuses those moments of armistice in which are
born the children of the beautiful. In Eureka
there is a nervous effort to show that brain, going
by the creeping and crawling ways that Poe has
already contemned, reaches the same end as
heart trusting to the poetical instinct which
alone, as he said, is indeed worthy of faith. This
quarrel of purposes is the reason of Eurekas
failure. I should like to wipe out three-quarters
of the book for the sake of the remainder.

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METAPHYSICS

Foe believed, after reading various writers on
astronomy and the constitution of the cosmos,
that the Universe was made by the flinging forth
from a common centre of innumerable atoms,
that, collecting towards individual centres, are,
in a more general movement, again converging.
But statistical arguments in support of this thesis
are unnecessary for the exposition of the comple
mentary idea that the soul of each man is a frag
ment of the soul of God, and that the end of
things will see the reabsorption of these million
wandering Psyches into the one soul to which
they all belong. Such arguments are worthless
in comparison with such luminous points as this,
for example, written as a postscript to the book :

" The pain of the consideration that we shall
lose our individual identity ceases at once when
we further reflect that the process, as above
described, is neither more nor less than the
absorption by each individual intelligence of all
other intelligences (that is, of the Universe) into
its own. That God may be all in all, each must
become God."

Now that is a fine thought, and it is not alone
in Eureka. But the" real value of the book is
in its unfulfilled promise of inspired guesswork,
its elevation of intuition above reasoning as a
means of truth, and its explanation of the prin
ciple of so doing as a trust in the poetical or

183

EDGAR ALLAN POE

symmetrical instinct, which, as we have already
suggested, is no other than the feeling for the
beautiful.

It is not often that Poe pierces directly
through his statistics. More often, in the meta
physical dialogues as well as in Eureka, he
reaches expression by leaving on one side the fog
of ill-founded reasoning from which

" Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud,"

wails his dream of God and Man. " Come ! we
will leave to the left the loud harmony of the
Pleiades, and swoop outward from the throne
into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where,
for pansies and violets and heart's-ease, are the
beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns."
Whenever he forgets to substantiate his imagi
nations by reference to works of science, when
he keeps the promise of that much post-dated
letter, he writes again and again pages of emo
tional self-projection into those states of exist
ence from which no traveller has yet returned to
solve the problems of metaphysicians.

These passages belong to art, not reasoning.
Their truth accordingly is to be judged by them
selves, and can neither be confuted nor sustained.
I choose as example a part of the dialogue
between Monos and Una, describing death and

184

METAPHYSICS

the conditions of thought and feeling that suc
ceed it, simplifying sensation until it no longer
needs the senses, but is become an abstract feel
ing of Time and Place that fills the void the
worms have slowly eaten into existence. Monos
is speaking :

" Words are vague things. My condition did
not deprive me of sentience. It appeared to me
not greatly dissimilar to the extreme quiescence
of him, who, having slumbered long and pro
foundly, lying motionless and fully prostrate in
a midsummer noon, begins to steal slowly back
into consciousness, through the mere sufficiency
of his sleep, and without being awakened by
external disturbances.

" I breathed no longer. The pulses were still.
The heart had ceased to beat. Volition had not
departed, but was powerless. The senses were
unusually active, although eccentrically so —
assuming often each other's functions at ran
dom. The taste and the smell were inextricably
confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal
and intense. The rose-water with which your
tenderness had moistened my lips to the last,
affected me with sweet fancies of flowers — fan
tastic flowers, far more lovely than any of the
old Earth, but whose prototypes we have here
blooming around us. The eyelids, transparent
and bloodless, offered no complete impediment
to vision. As volition was in abeyance, the balls
could not roll in their sockets, but all objects
within the range of the visual hemisphere were

185

EDGAR ALLAN POE

seen with more or less distinctness : the rays
which fell upon the external retina, or into the
corner of the eye, producing a more vivid effect
than those which struck the front or interior sur
face. Yet, in the former instance, this effect
was so far anomalous that I appreciated it only
as sound — sound sweet or discordant as the
matters presenting themselves at my side were
light or dark in shade, curved or angular in out
line. The hearing, at the same time, although
excited in degree, was not irregular in action,
estimating real sounds with an extravagance of
precision not less than of sensibility. Touch had
undergone a modification more peculiar. Its
impressions were tardily received, but pertin
aciously retained, and resulted always in the
highest physical pleasure. Thus the pressure of
your sweet fingers upon my eyelids, at first only
recognised through vision, at length, long
after their removal, filled my whole being with a
sensual delight immeasurable. I say with a sen
sual delight. All my perceptions were purely
sensual. The materials furnished the passive brain
by the senses were not in the least degree
wrought into shape by the deceased understand
ing. Of pain there was some little ; of pleasure
there was much ; but of moral pain or pleasure
none at all. Thus your wild sobs floated into
my ear with all their mournful cadences, and
were appreciated in their every variation of sad
tone ; but they were soft musical sounds and no
more ; they conveyed to the extinct reason no
intimation of the sorrows which gave them birth ;
while the large and constant tears which fell

186

METAPHYSICS

upon my face, telling the bystanders of a heart
which broke, thrilled every fibre of my frame
with ecstasy alone. And this was in truth the
Death of which these bystanders spoke rever
ently, in low whispers — you, sweet Una, gasp
ingly, with loud cries.

" They attired me for the coffin — three or four
dark figures which flitted busily to and fro. As
these crossed the direct line of my vision they
affected me as forms ; but upon passing to my
side their images impressed me with the idea of
shrieks, groans, and other dismal expressions of
terror, of horror, or of woe. You alone, habited
in a white robe, passed in all directions musically
about me.

" The day waned ; and, as its light faded away,
I became possessed by a vague uneasiness, an
anxiety such as the sleeper feels when sad real
sounds fall continuously within his ear — low dis
tant bell-tones, solemn, at long but equal inter
vals, and commingling with melancholy dreams.
Night arrived ; and with its shadows a heavy
discomfort. It oppressed my limbs with the
oppression of some dull weight, and was pal
pable. There was also a moaning sound, not
unlike the distant reverberation of surf, but more
continuous, which, beginning with the first twi
light, had grown in strength with the darkness.
Suddenly lights were brought into the room, and
this reverberation became forthwith interrupted
into frequent unequal bursts of the same sound,
but less dreary and less distinct. The ponderous
oppression was in a great measure relieved ; and,
issuing from the flame of each lamp, for there

187

EDGAR ALLAN POE

were many, there flowed unbrokenly into my
ears a strain of melodious monotone. And when
now, dear Una, approaching the bed upon which
I lay outstretched, you sat gently by my side,
breathing odour from your sweet lips, and press
ing them upon my brow, there arose tremulously
within my bosom, and mingling with the merely
physical sensations which circumstances had
called forth, a something akin to sentiment
itself — a feeling that, half appreciating, half
responded to your earnest love and sorrow ; but
this feeling took no root in the pulseless heart,
and seemed indeed rather a shadow than a reality,
and faded quickly away, first into extreme qui
escence, and then into a purely sensual pleasure
as before.

" And now, from the wreck and chaos of the
usual senses, there appeared to have arisen
within me a sixth, all perfect. In its exercise I
found a wild delight : yet a delight still physical,
inasmuch as the understanding had in it no part.
Motion in the animal frame had fully ceased.
No muscle quivered ; no nerve thrilled ; no artery
throbbed. But there seemed to have sprung up,
in the brain, that of which no words could convey
to the merely human intelligence even an indis
tinct conception. Let me term it a mental pen
dulous pulsation. It was the moral embodiment
of man's abstract idea of Time. By the absolute
equalisation of this movement, or of such as this,
had the cycles of the firmamental orbs them
selves been adjusted. By its aid I measured the
irregularities of the clock upon the mantel, and
of the watches of the attendants. Their tickings

188

METAPHYSICS

came sonorously to my ears. The slightest
deviations from the true proportion — and these
deviations were omniprevalent — affected me just
as violations of abstract truth were wont, on
earth, to affect the moral sense. Although no
two of the time-pieces in the chamber struck the
individual seconds accurately together, yet I had
no difficulty in holding steadily in mind the
tones, and the respective momentary errors of
each. And this— this keen, perfect, self-existing
sentiment of duration — this sentiment existing
(as" man could not possibly have conceived it to
exist) independently of any succession of events
— this idea — this sixth sense, upspringing from
the ashes of the rest, was the first obvious and
certain step of the intemporal soul upon the
threshold of the temporal Eternity.

"It was midnight ; and you still sat by my side.
All others had departed from the chamber of
Death. They had deposited me in the coffin.
The lamps burned flickeringly ; for this I knew
by the tremulousness of the monotonous strains.
But, suddenly these strains diminished in dis
tinctness and in volume. Finally they ceased.
The perfume in my nostrils died away. Forms
affected my vision no longer. The oppression
of the Darkness uplifted itself from my bosom.
A dull shock like that of electricity pervaded
my frame, and was followed by total loss of the
idea of contact. All of what man has termed
sense was merged in the sole consciousness of >';
entity, and in the one abiding sentiment of dura- ,
tion. The mortal body had been at length
stricken with the hand of the deadly Decay.

189

EDGAR ALLAN POE

" Yet had not all of sentience departed ; for the
consciousness and the sentiment remaining sup
plied some of its functions by a lethargic intui
tion. I appreciated the direful change now in
operation upon the flesh, and, as the dreamer is
sometimes aware of the bodily presence of one
who leans over him, so, sweet Una, I still dully
felt that you sat by my side. So, too, when
the noon of the second day came, I was not
unconscious of those movements which displaced
you from my side, which confined me within the
coffin, which deposited me within the hearse,
which bore me to the grave, which lowered me
within it, which heaped heavily the mould upon
me, and which thus left me, in blackness and
corruption, to my sad and solemn slumbers with
the worm.

" And here, in the prison-house which has
few secrets to disclose, there rolled away days
and weeks and months ; and the soul watched
narrowly each second as it flew, and without
effort took record of its flight — without effort
and without object.

" A year passed. The consciousness of being
had grown hourly more indistinct, and that of
mere locality had in great measure usurped its
position. The idea of entity was becoming
merged in that of place. The narrow space
immediately surrounding what had been the
body was now growing to be the body itself.
At length, as often happens to the sleeper (by
sleep and its world alone is Death imaged) — at
length, as sometimes happened on Earth to the
deep slumberer, when some flitting light half

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METAPHYSICS

startled him into awakening, yet left him half
enveloped in dreams — so to me, in the strict
embrace of the Shadow, came that light which
alone might have had power to startle, the light
of enduring Love." Men toiled at the grave in
which I lay darkling. They upthrew the damp
earth. Upon my mouldering bones there de
scended the cofrin of Una.

" And now again all was void. That nebulous
light had been extinguished. That feeble thrill
had vibrated itself into quiescence. Many lustra
had supervened. Dust had returned to dust.
The worm had food no more. The sense of
being had at length utterly departed, and there
reigned in its stead — instead of all things, domi
nant and perpetual, the autocrats Place " and
^ime? For that which was not, for that which
nad no form, for that which had no thought, for
that which had no sentience, for that which was
soulless, yet of which matter formed no portion
—for all this nothingness, yet for all this im
mortality, the grave was still a home, and the
corrosive hours, co-mates."

In this noble passage is no scientific truth, but
the truth of intuition, whose opposite may be no
less true than itself, whose opposite might, in
deed, be no less truthfully written by the same
man in a different mood. This is the metaphysic
of the poets, and the only one that can be the
body-stuff of art. For in such passages, and for
those in which he recognises the difference be
tween their truth and that other truth that is

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

sought by logic, between the innumerable facets
of absolute truth, and the variable truth that is
gleaned from facts whose absoluteness we can
never know, is Poe to be valued. The activity of
his mind was its own enemy. It made him pre
hensile of scientific knowledge, while without the
power of judging the rottenness or the strength
of its branches. It hampered him by making
him weakly deny the principles he had himself
discovered, and seek to buttress his work with
science and so to twist it into such a position
that it needed buttressing. But, in fortunate
moments of inspiration he trusted his own wings.
Popular scientific books are left to the multitude
for whom they are designed. Intuition is free
and bold, trusting in its own truths. " A perfect
consistency is an absolute truth," and is not
obscured by argument. The Nebular Hypo
thesis of Laplace, Kepler's Law,

" The Atoms of Democritus

And Newton's Particles of Light,
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore

Where Israel's tents do shine so bright."

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FRAYED ENDS

BEFORE proceeding to a summary that shall
attempt a portraiture of Poe's mind, there are,
as is natural in a book built on the plan I have
followed, a few frayed ends to be considered.

For example, I have not mentioned a small
group of his writings that are less stories than
studies, less studies than dreams of ideal rather
than actual landscapes. They do not make up
any great bulk in his work, but are proof of a
delight in nature for her own sake, a proof that
Poe shares Julius Rodman's pleasure, not only
in watching natural scenery but in describing it.
The Island of the Fay holds an allegory and a
suggestion of nineteenth-century fairy tale, so
delicate, so pretty, as to contrast strangely with
what we recognise as the predominant, and too
readily conclude were the invariable, colours of
Poe's imagination. The Domain of Arnheim
exalts landscape gardening, which Poe more
than once set among the fine arts. Landor's
Cottage is a sketch of what a poet's house
should be.

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

I had planned, earlier in the book, to quote
two or three of Foe's descriptions of rooms, as
I believe that few things are more expressive
than rooms of the characters of their owners or
designers. I refer the reader to the accounts of
Poe's own homes in the biographical chapter,
and then, with the licence given by the title of
this, do now what I had meant to do before,
letting the first of these imaginary rooms be
the parlour of Landors Cottage.

" Nothing could be more rigorously simple
than the furniture of the parlour. On the floor
was an ingrain carpet, of excellent texture — a
white ground, spotted with small circular green
figures. At the windows were curtains of snowy
white jaconet muslin : they were tolerably full,
and hung decisively, perhaps rather formally, in
sharp parallel plaits to the floor. The walls were
papered with a French paper of great delicacy—
a silver ground, with a faint green cord running
zigzag throughout. Its expanse was relieved
merely by three of Julien's exquisite lithographs
a trois crayons, fastened to the wall without
frames. One of these drawings was a scene of
Oriental luxury, or rather voluptuousness ;
another was a ' carnival piece,' spirited beyond
compare ; the third was a Greek female head :
a face so divinely beautiful, and yet of an ex
pression so provokingly indeterminate, never
before arrested my attention.

"The more substantial furniture consisted
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FRAYED ENDS

of a round table, a few chairs (including a large
rocking-chair) and a sofa, or rather ' settee ' ;
its material was plain maple painted a creamy
white, slightly interstriped with green — the seat
of cane. The chairs and table were ' to match ' ;
but the forms of all had evidently been designed
by the same brain which planned ' the grounds ' ;
it is impossible to imagine anything more graceful.
" On the table were a few books ; a large,
square crystal bottle of some novel perfume ; a
plain, ground-glass astral (not solar) lamp, with
an Italian shade ; and a large vase of resplendently-
blooming flowers. Flowers indeed, of gorgeous
colours and delicate odour, formed the sole mere
decoration of the apartment. The fireplace was
nearly filled with a vase of brilliant geranium.
On a triangular shelf in each angle of the room
stood also a similar vase, varied only as to its
lovely contents. One or two smaller bouquets
adorned the mantel; and late violets clustered
about the opened windows."

Beside that wholesome symphony in lucid
colour, let me set the room of Roderick Usher :

" The room in which I found myself was very
large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow,
and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the
black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible
from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned
light made their way through the trellised panes,
and served to render sufficiently distinct the more
prominent objects around; the eye, however,
struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and
fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the
walls. The general furniture was profuse, com
fortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and
musical instruments lay scattered about, but
failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt
that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An
air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung
over and pervaded all."

It is as if, in different moods, we had looked
twice into the chamber of Poe's soul.

Then, too, I should perhaps have spoken earlier
of Poe's plagiarisms, of which much has been
made, perhaps because he made so much of other
people's. He disfigured his criticisms by continual
accusations of this kind, and too often based his
impeachments on supposed thefts from himself.
Even the authors he admired, like Hawthorne,
were not free from the supposition that they were
indebted to Poe for some of their effects. It is
an old proverb that sets a thief to catch a thief,
and Poe was as sturdy a robber as Shakespeare.
Rebukes of thievery come from him with a bad
grace, since, if he coveted a flower in another
man's garden, he did not hesitate in taking it,
dyeing it, and planting it in his own. But, in
spite of his furious accusations, his views on
plagiary were, at bottom, sound. They are best
summed up in the last paragraph of his reply to

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FRAYED ENDS

" Outis," who had defended Longfellow against
him, and carried the war into his own country.

" It appears to me that what seems to be the
gross inconsistency of plagiarism as perpetrated
by a poet, is very easily thus resolved : the poetic
sentiment (even without reference to the poetic
power) implies a peculiarly, perhaps, an abnor
mally, keen appreciation of the beautiful, with
a longing for its assimilation, or absorption, into
the poetic identity. What the poet intensely ad
mires becomes thus, in very fact, although only
partially, a portion of his own intellect. It has
a secondary origination within his own soul — an
origination altogether apart, although springing
from its primary origination from without. The
poet is thus possessed by another's thought, and
cannot be said to take of it possession. But, in
either view, he thoroughly feels it as his own,
and this feeling is counteracted only by the
sensible presence of its true, palpable origin in
the volume from which he has derived it — an
origin which, in the long lapse of years, it is
almost impossible not to forget — for in the mean
time the thought itself is forgotten. But the
frailest association will regenerate it — it springs
up with all the vigour of a new birth — its absolute
originality is not even a matter of suspicion — and
when the poet has written it and printed it, and
on its account is charged with plagiarism, there
will be no one in the world more entirely
astounded than himself. Now from what I have
said it will be evident that the liability to acci
dents of this character is in the direct ratio of

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

the poetic sentiment — of the susceptibility to the
poetic impression ; and in fact all literary history
demonstrates that, for the most frequent and
palpable plagiarisms, we must search the works
of the most eminent poets."

Poe's politics, too, have so far had no place in
this book. They were not elaborate, or more
important to him than plain likes and dislikes.
It was an ironic accident that connected his
death with the polling-booth. He liked freedom
and could not recognise it under a democracy.
He disliked mobs because they imply at once
brute force, and a kind of imprisonment of the
brains of which they are composed. He disliked
the word "progress," and indeed, most of the
terms that are useful to political speakers. Poe's
political views are very pleasantly expressed in
Some Words with a Mummy, where, in a conver
sation with a stripped and galvanised Egyptian
Count, the civilisations of Egypt and America
are compared.

" We then spoke of the great beauty and im
portance of Democracy, and were at much trouble
in impressing the Count with a due sense of the
advantages we enjoyed in living where there was
suffrage ad libitum, and no king.

" He listened with marked interest, and in
fact, seemed not a little amused. When we had
done, he said that a great while ago there had
occurred something of very similar sort. Thirteen

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FRAYED ENDS

Egyptian provinces determined all at once to be
free, and so set a magnificent example to the rest
of mankind. They assembled their wise men,
and concocted the most ingenious constitution it
is possible to conceive. For a while they managed
remarkably well ; only their habit of bragging
was prodigious. The thing ended, however, in
the consolidation of the thirteen states, with some
fifteen or twenty others, in the most odious and
insupportable despotism that ever was heard of
upon the face of the Earth.

" I asked what was the name of the usurping
tyrant.

" As well as the Count could recollect, it was
Mob.

" Not knowing what to say to this, I raised
my voice, and deplored the Egyptian ignorance
of steam."

And now, I think, we may proceed to our
conclusion. In examining severally the facets
of Poe's mind, and the various activities that
represent them, an observation must early have
suggested itself, that the ideas sown by these
activities carry us further than Poe carried them.
We must also have noticed that the tempera
mental character of Poe's writings is less important
than their " fundamental brain- work." The Poe
who thrills us is less exciting than the Poe who
thinks, and even the tales and poems are of more
than their face-value on that account. It seems

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

almost an accident that the spirit which sought
for its exercise so clear and rarefied an atmo
sphere, should have found a home in that
nocturnal grove. There is a quality in his
work more universal than that of strangeness,
a quality not of temperament but of brain. His
temperament often found expression, his brain
was seldom able to reach its far more difficult
goal. He left us weird and shapely works of
art, but, in the realm of thought, how much
more often a blaze on a tree trunk showing that
he had passed than a cleared path showing that
he had passed with ease and been able to make a
road. Yet it seems to me that these blazed tree
trunks are the achievements that should keep his
memory alive. He made a few beautiful things.
So have others. But how few in the history of
thought have tried to teach, even in broken
speech, the secret of beautiful things, and the
way not to their making only but to their under
standing. It was to that end that Poe blazed
his trees, and, when we see how often he mistook
the road, we should remember in what a dense
forest he was travelling, and how lonely was the
pioneer. There is a most applicable saying in
Coleridge's Table-talk :

" To estimate a man like Vico, or any great
man who has made discoveries and committed
errors, you ought to say to yourself, e He did so

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FRAYED ENDS

and so in the year 1720, a Papist, at Naples.'
Now, what would he not have done if he had
lived now, and could have availed himself of all
our vast acquisitions in physical science ? "

In estimating Poe, that is, in learning the bias
and the personal background that we must know
in order truly to read his thoughts, we must sub
stitute for the year 1720 the year 1840, for
Papist what we may imagine to have been his
religion, and for Naples the peculiar America he
knew. It would be humiliating to ourselves to
try to rewrite the final sentence, substituting
aesthetic for physical science. We could only
say that if he lived to-day he would have the
advantage of his own thought, matured and
clarified by seventy years, passed from America
to France, and France to England. Baudelaire
and Pater in different ways, knowingly and
unknowingly, as a disciple and in perfect inde
pendence, do little more than blaze again the
trees he had already marked. He would find in
the aesthetic that underlies this account of him
only his own ideas, his own path, made clearer
perhaps by the felling of the forest trees, and the
passage of others by the gaps through which he
had to fight his way.

His thinking and writing life covers the years
between 1828 and 1849. In England the writers
of that time were Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle,

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

Lytton, Disraeli, Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett.
Before the end the star of Robert Browning was
rising in cloud. At the beginning the power of
Byron had not yet fallen into its period of con
tempt, the period that follows dynasties and
writers alike with a momentary oblivion. Leigh
Hunt was teaching the admiration of Keats and
Shelley. Wordsworth and Coleridge were living.
Christopher North was rioting in Blackwootfs.
Hazlitt was writing his Life of Napoleon.

In France these twenty years cover the second
period of the Romantics. Lamartine, Hugo,
Gautier, Dumas, Merimee, were writing the
books in whose atmosphere Baudelaire was
growing up to recognise in Poe something more
than a chance literary affinity, and to do him
the inestimable service of making him a French
author.

In America also there was a group of con
siderable writers. And here we come suddenly
on a fact that helps us to an understanding of
the relations between Poe and his country. Poe
did not know them. Hawthorne was writing
his tales, Emerson his essays, Longfellow was
pouring out his prose poetry. Lowell was be
ginning. Of these men Poe attacked Long
fellow for plagiarism, was on terms of acquaint
anceship with Lowell, admired Hawthorne, and
was very rude to Emerson. I have read a polite

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FRAYED ENDS

letter addressed to him by Hawthorne, and
Lowell corresponded with him on such terms
that Poe called him " My dear Mr. Lowell," and
" My dear Friend," and signed himself " Most
cordially Yours," and " Truly your friend." But
the letters are concerned with business, with a
new magazine and contributions to it. Poe
flattered Lowell, and Lowell wrote a short life
of Poe full of inaccuracies that, if Poe did not
supply, he did not correct. But there seems to
have been no interchange of ideas between them,
or indeed between Poe and any other of the
writers of his time. He had " avowed ill-
feeling towards his brother authors," and for
him Emerson walked not " with that pure intel
lectual gleam diffused about his person like the
garment of a shining one," but in the sulphurous
fumes and the black cloak of the devil himself.
Poe had no friend in an artist of his own strength.
It is doubtful if he could have found one except
in Hawthorne. He had no friend in a thinker
of his own power. He was extraordinarily
alone.

The reason for this was manifold. Poe was
without money, and so had but little time for
friendship unconnected with his newspaper work,
and none for those intellectual companionships
that are rich in proportion to what is spent on
them. His principles were opposed to those of

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

his contemporaries. The theory of art that was
j his staff of life held didacticism to be the unfor
givable sin, and these writers were concerned
with morality for its own sake. With them,
except perhaps with Hawthorne, who used
morality as an artistic background for his work,
the making of beauty was secondary to the more
obvious doing of good. Instead of making
possibilities of life, they were intent on teaching
how to live well. They held art to be the
servant of the people, and Poe saw as little of
" the people " as he could, and disliked what he
saw. Their minds had all been lit by flying
sparks from the French Revolution, which had
never flamed for Poe. They were democrats or
socialists, in the spirit if not in the letter. Poe
held that " the People have nothing to do with
the laws but to obey them." He could have no
sympathy with the communists of Brook Farm*
or with their friends.

He was left, then, to the America that was
not writing books of any importance. He found
there some friendly journalists, who were sorry
for him because, as one of them said, " he wrote
with fastidious difficulty and in a style too much
above the popular level to be well paid," and
women poets, some of whom were very good to
him, some quarrelled over their letters and his,
and all suffered his protestations of love and

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FRAYED ENDS

poetry. He found also the firm affection of his
own household, his mother-in-law and his wife,
with their pets, a household that, whether at
Fordham or elsewhere, was always a peaceful
small citadel, held by these three against the
world.

But his loneliness was deeper than that of
lacking friends for his head. There was a real,
if undefined hostility between himself and the
nation to which he belonged. And this is harder
to explain. If, as M. Remy de Gourmont thinks,
he was " instruit jusqu'a 1'erudition," it would be
possible to suppose that his loneliness was that
of a scholar mistrusted by the uneducated. It
is of moment to show that it was not so. His
learning was a heap of dross and gold, the gold
perhaps acquired in his school years, the dross
accumulated haphazard, glittering like gold, and
then suddenly betraying itself because he had
been too hurried to follow the good advice of
Quarles :

" Use common-place books, or collections, as
indexes to light thee to the authours, lest thou be
abused : he that takes learning upon trust, makes
him a faire cup-board with another's plate. He
is an ill-advised purchaser, whose title depends
more on witnesses than evidences."

Collections of literary gossip, and scrap-books
of fact and quotation were treated by him with

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

as much confidence as original works, and used
to throw on his own writings the light of a mid
night oil that he had never burnt. He took this
learning upon trust and it frequently exposed
him. He leaned too heavily on the titles of
books, and so, because Ver-Vert sounded incom
prehensible, Cresset's immoral parrot, that died
of an indigestion, shrieks its bad language among
the books on Usher's table, Swedenborg's Heaven
and Hell and Robert Flud's Chiromancy, in
company almost as incongruous with it as that
of the scandalised nuns in the convent where it
lived.

Learning was not the quality that kept him
separate from his fellows. It is a thin veil at
worst, that any scholar with a heart learns how

tear aside. Poe's conflict with his nation was
due to nothing that he had acquired, but to
something in the character of his mind. I think
it was due to a rather scornful pride. He felt
that his intellect had been born free, while those
about him always had been, and always would
be, slaves. He knew that free intellects are rare,
and he had the pride of the king's son brought
up among the shepherds in the fairy tale. Only,
while the shepherds were proud to admit their
foundling's superiority, Americans, seeing that it
carried no dower, were not. Their patronage
increased his scorn. "That there were once

208

VV V.

FRAYED ENDS

' seven wise men,' " he wrote disdainfully, " is by
no means an historical fact ; and I am rather
inclined to rank the idea among the Kabbala."
He could speculate without fear, his fellows
never without a thought of the praise or the
blame that would be given them by the black-
robed ministers of public morality. Poe owned
a higher censorship. He knew that he was
nearer than they, alike to the earth and to the
stars, and in all his work there is a breath of
impatience with those who are never to under
stand it. He felt himself surrounded by fools
and deaf men, to whom he had to shout to be
heard, and exaggerate to be even partially under-
, stood. He was like a wolf chained by the leg
1 among a lot of domesticated dogs.* While
they were busy with their bones, giving honour
to him who had the biggest, Poe wandered
in fancy on mountain peaks and in wooded
valleys, seeking food of a more intangible
character, and honour that is better worth the
winning.

Both parties were conscious of the distinction

he drew. It was perhaps through resentment of

i his intellectual pride that his enemies seized so

eagerly upon his drunkenness. It was a weapon

* There is surely no need for me to tell Americans that I
am not attacking their country for being like others. Perhaps
there is a land where the chained wolves outnumber the
domesticated dogs. But I do not know it.

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

for them, and they were glad of it. For, as
Baudelaire suggests, it is inconceivable that all
American writers, except Poe, were angels of
sobriety. Other men who drank excused them
selves by their stupidity, and were forgiven. But
Poe was so certain of his height above America,
that, when ill-fortune set him below it, America
was glad of the chance to trample on him. It
is a common spectacle. We cannot forget a
writer of our own times whose obvious intellectual
superiority brought upon his sins a popular
execration that would never have been poured
on the crimes of a man of popular stupidity.
" Come down you who sit upon Olympus talking
with the Gods! You forget us, but we re
member. You are lower than us. Let us teach
you. Come down from Olympus ! Let us tread
you in the mud as a punishment for your base
ness, you who dared to look above it and com
mune with the Gods we cannot see."

There is no need here to recapitulate the stages
of Poe's conquest by drink. We have followed
them in the account of his life. Our only concern
now is to notice that his drunkenness, such as
it was, combined with his intellect, to separate
him from the nation in whose country he
happened to be born. He lived and worked like
a man who knows that he is Lhated. His mind
must indeed have been strong to work even as

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FRAYED ENDS

calmly as it did. As he cut his way through the
forest, to wake the Sleeping Beauty with a kiss,
he was alone and worse than alone. Brambles
coiled about him, holding him back, and black
malicious snakes hung from the boughs before
him, hissed in his face, and fastened on his wrists.

Yet, throughout his short life (he was forty
when he died), the development of his brain
went on unhindered by the struggle in which he
was engaged. There is a unity in his mind,
whose principle is its loneliness and pugnacity;
but there is also a unity in its growth. Not one
of Poe's faculties seems to have been acquired
before or after any other. He was born with
the same number of facets with which he died.
A broad glance at his work almost suggests that
his exertions in all kinds were contemporaneous
and parallel. A closer examination makes it
clear that, though all facets were there, yet the
light fell on them in an order that is not without
interest. All might sparkle at any time, but one
by one they became steadily luminous.

The order in which the facets of Poe's mind
shone out with particular luminosity, bears a
close analogy to the stages, or planes of thought,
through which passes the intellect of mankind.
He began by writing poetry. Those moments
of his life that seemed important to him were
moments of intuition, when mood and picture

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

fused into something with the power of creating
in other minds a similar experience. Swiftly,
during the few years that he spent chiefly on his
verse, the power of analysis increased in him,
modifying the work he was to do, and clarify
ing what he had already done, in invariably sue
cessful revision. The prose tales that followed
the poetry show both these faculties reacting
together with growing power. Analysis and
intuition gave him a creative power, critical of
itself, and so of others. In examining books
and poetry not his own his practice began to
systematise itself in theory. Simultaneously
with the beginning of this theorising about
aesthetic, the analytical faculty, too energetic
for the work he gave it, became unruly and
assumed an independent importance, wasting
itself in the solving of puzzles, and, making use
of the powers with which it had grown, delight
ing him with trains of reasoning, and with tales
in which analysis was itself given an aesthetic
value. Reason, spasmodically at first, began to
usurp the throne of art. Now it raised his art
to its highest point, and, at the next moment,
turned it to nothingness in forgetting its exist
ence. Finally, he began to let argument satisfy
him, and let intuition atrophy for lack of use.
Theory became too powerful to allow itself the
suppleness that would have kept it true. He

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FRAYED ENDS

was obliged to turn for inspiration to old intui
tions, and stifled them beneath a skill too self-
opinionated to be careful of them. So far Poe
had gone when he died. He had traversed all
the stages of man's mind. Perhaps he chose the
right time for his death. He had completed the
circle, like a civilisation. Perhaps nothing was
left for him but the decay of Babylon or Greece.
It may have been time for the sand to rise
over the ruins. On the other hand, he died
with a knowledge of the mind's biography that
could have given his speculations a weight they
seldom possessed. He stood upon the mountain
top, tired out by his climb; but he could see
below him the pathway he had trod, and the
author of Monos and Una and The Power of
Words might have gone on to write a series of
such dialogues, freed of the old contradictions
between their parts, dialogues in which reason
ing was indeed emotional and dream one in
texture with the emotional reasoning. He
might have reviewed the work of his life, and
revealed, seventy years ago, the theory of the
beautiful to which his ideas so constantly
approach, and, by seeming accident or the
blindness of hurry, so constantly deny. If he
had had but the time to do this, his work would
not have been so frequently mispraised. But
he struck his blows as he went, driven or fight-

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EDGAR ALLAN POE

ing ; he was never able to return and widen the
breaches he had made. Man after man has felt
in reading single groups of his work that a
powerful force was passing, and, noting its
momentary direction, remained ignorant of its
general trend. Few men have been so irrele
vantly praised and blamed. Few men have been
so single-minded in their aim. Foe, who could
have been a great man of business,* a great
mathematician, a great thinker, a great artist,
was none of these things, failing in life, but
seeking, down every turning that presented
itself, for that scrap of knowledge concerning
beauty and the aesthetic life of man, which might
there be possibly concealed. His work, as it is
left to us, is made up of observations and finds,
by the way, each one modified by the blind
alley, high road, or field path that he happened
to be pursuing at the time. It is embedded in
rubbish and beautiful things, verse with the
jewelled wings of tropic moths, hoarse-throated
critical articles calming again and again into
passages of invaluable wisdom, dialogues as
unforgettable as Leopardi's, a prose book in
which argument and mysticism battle together
to a common end, tales that are like Defoe's,
tales that are like Lytton's, tales whose flavour

* No one can doubt this who observes his management of
the various magazines that passed under his control.

214

FRAYED ENDS

is that of the most delightful of Euclid's pro
positions, and others by whose colouring, because
it is easily recognised, I suppose he will always
be chiefly remembered. Beside the whole mass,
I believe he would have written, like the painter
beneath his picture, " Hoc faciebat." He was
doing this, while, all the time, his eyes were
seeking in the gloom the lamp that, though he
found it again and again, he was never able to
take from its altar and carry home with him for
the enlightenment of humanity.

215

POSTSCRIPT : THE FRENCH
VIEW OF POE

POSTSCRIPT: THE FRENCH
VIEW OF POE

IT has been said that the best of Poe's works
was Charles Baudelaire. As in most bold
splashes of exaggeration, there is a drop of
truth in this. Three volumes out of the eight
that hold Baudelaire's collected works are filled
with translations from Poe. It is not an in
frequent surprise to find, on turning Baudelaire's
own opinions into English, that, with little more
than accidental alteration, they are written in
Poe's words. Through those translations, and
the writings and emulations they inspired, Poe
has become a French writer. Byron and Shake
speare are read through glasses that look across
the Channel. Poe is read as if he were a native.
His influence, as M. Remy de Gourmont points
out, is far greater than that of Shelley, or even
of Rossetti, whose Latin genius might have
expected a readier welcome. Every year new
monographs and new translations are published.
He is a " popular " writer as well as one whose
critical influence has run through the veins of

219

EDGAR ALLAN POE

French literature. This month * the Mercure de
France, that feeds the most intellectual French
public, has issued a new version of the poems.
Last month Poe was the subject of the twenty-
seventh number of the Portraits d'hier, a little
bi-monthly, twopence-halfpenny, bookstall sheet.
I have a list of the first twenty-four numbers of
the Portraits dhier ; no Englishman or American,
and Wagner, Ibsen, Goethe and Beethoven alone,
among foreigners, appear in it. Here is a list
of some of Poe's translators, beside Baudelaire
and Mallarme : E. D. Forgues, W. Hughes,
E. Goubert, H. Page's, L. Lavergnolle, E. Hen-
nequin, E. Guillemin, F. JRabbe, C. Simond,
G. Mourey, J. H. Rosny, C. Demblon, V. Orban.
There are others, and a still larger list could be
made of the essays and books on Poe that I have
seen in the Bibliotheque Nationale and elsewhere,
some few of which shall presently help us in
drawing a portrait of Poe, the French writer.

I set down these facts as the readiest means of
making clear how firm is Poe's position in France,
how different from that of any other English
author. I wished to do this before examining in
detail what this position is, and how it came to
be so securely held.

To discover the original colours of that vision
of Poe that caught French eyes, filled them, and

* June 1910.
220

THE FRENCH VIEW OF POE

remained undisturbed there until quite recent
years, we must consider Baudelaire as the shop-
window through which Frenchmen saw Poe and
his works. We must examine the character of
the glass and allow for its texture and formation,
as we should allow for reflection and refraction
in looking ourselves through a window at any
bright-coloured object within. Baudelaire him
self has suffered from such a glass. Prejudice
and hearsay have made it difficult for those who
read him, and impossible for those who do not,
to see in him other than a sinister, opium or
haschisch-drunken creature, the lover of a black
woman, a kind of elaborate Villon. Lee-
Hamilton's excellent sonnet represents the tra
ditional portrait. I quote it here for its own
sake :

" A Paris gutter of the good old times,

Black and putrescent in its stagnant bed,
Save where the shamble oozings fringe it red,
Or scaffold trickles, or nocturnal crimes.

" It holds dropped gold ; dead flowers from tropic

climes ;
Gems true and false, by midnight maskers

shed;
Old pots of rouge; old broken phials that

spread

Vague fumes of musk, with fumes of slums and
slimes.

221

EDGAR ALLAN POE

" And everywhere, as glows the set of day,

There floats upon the winding fetid mire
The gorgeous iridescence of decay :

" A wavy film of colour gold and fire

Trembles all through it as you pick your way,
And streaks of purple that are straight from
Tyre."

It is a true enough picture of the superficial
appearance of a selection from Baudelaire's poetry,
made by tradition, which will never forget that
Les Fleurs du Mai cost their author a prosecu
tion and a fine. It is also a delightful piece of
colour, but, if Baudelaire had been that and no
more, he would not have translated Poe. Is there
anything in The Murders in the Rue Morgue that
could move in such a man "une commotion
singuliere " ? I think not. We must correct
that portrait by setting beside it a prose poem
writted by Baudelaire himself:

" — Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme enigma-
tique, dis ? ton pere, ta mere, ta sceur ou ton
frere ?

" — Je n'ai ni pere, ni mere, ni sceur, ni frere.

" — Tes amis ?

" — Vous vous servez la d'une parole dont le
sens m'est reste jusqu'a ce jour inconnu.

« _Ta patrie ?

" — J'ignore sous quelle latitude elle est situe'e.

" —La beaute ?

222

THE FRENCH VIEW OF POE

" — Je Faimerais volontiers, deesse et immor
telle.

« _ L'or ?

" — Je le hais comme vous haissez Dieu.

" — Eh ! qu'aimes tu done, extraordinaire
Stranger ?

" — J'aime les nuages . . . les nuages qui
passent ... la bas ... les merveilleux nuages."

Baudelaire was more than a dead thing whose
decay was lit with iridescent colours. Like the
stranger of his poem, he loved " the clouds . . .
the clouds that pass . . . yonder . . . the mar
vellous clouds," and all else that freed the
intellect, that dissolved (impossible but in a
delightful hallucination) the ties between the
spirit and the earth. Poe's detective story begins
with a few paragraphs of analysis that set the key
for the rest, somewhere in the immaterial regions
of geometry. Baudelaire's admiration for Poe
opens on this note, repeated again and again.
He found in Poe, first a liberator of the spirit,
and then himself as he thought he was or
might be.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue was adapted
and translated independently by two French
writers in 1846. The papers in which these
versions appeared fought over their rights, and
Baudelaire learnt in this manner the name of the
author whose tale had so moved him. I give his

223

EDGAR ALLAN POE

own account of what followed, from a letter to
Armand Fraisse :

" Je puis vous marquer quelque chose de plus
singulier et de presque incroyable. En 1846 ou
1847, j'eus connaissance de quelques fragments
d'EdgarPoe: j'eprouvai une commotion singuliere.
Ses ceuvres completes n'ayant ete rassemblees
qu'apres sa mort, en une edition unique, j'eus la
patience de me Her avec des Americains vivant a
Paris, pour leur emprunter des collections de
journeaux qui avaient ete diriges par Edgar Poe.
Et alors, je trouvai, croyez moi si vous voulez,
des poemes, et des nouvelles, dont j'avais eu la
pensee, mais vague et confuse, mal ordonnee, et
que Poe avait su combiner et mener a la per
fection."

M. Remy de Gourmont thinks there is an
exaggeration in this statement, that Baudelaire
had to seek Poe's work in copies of American
papers. He points out that Tales of the Grotesque
and Arabesque had appeared in 1839. But that
fact, even if Baudelaire knew it, does not affect
the real interest of the paragraph. Baudelaire
recognised in Poe something of his own soul,
and came swiftly to believe that this American
writer held the key to his own development.
As time went on and he added tale by tale
to his bulk of translated work, Poe seems to
have assumed a still greater significance for him.
In Mon cceur mis a nu he writes, " De Maistre

224

THE FRENCH VIEW OF POE

et Edgar Poe m'ont appris a raisonner," and
registers this resolve : " Faire tous les matins ma
priere a Dieu, reservoir de toute force et de toute
justice, a mon pere, a Mariette, et a Poe, comme
intercesseurs." I am reminded of that fine
theatrical creed of Bernard Shaw's artist in The
Doctor s Dilemma.

The translation of Poe meant more for Baude
laire than the rendering of a good foreign writer
into his own language. His feelings were not far
different from those of an impassioned believer
translating the New Testament. Swinburne's
enthusiasm for Victor Hugo was not so
violent.

Stephane Mallarme, who did for the poems
what Baudelaire did for the prose, suggests that
Baudelaire found the inspiration of Le Flambeau
Vivant in the last lines of To Helen. I give the
French poem and the lines from Poe, as an
example of the kind of echoes that so often
startle Baudelaire's readers.

"... Only thine eyes remained :
They would not go — they never yet have gone ;
Lighting my lonely pathway home that night,
They have not left me (as my hopes have)

since ;
They follow me — they lead me through the

years ;

They are my ministers — yet I their slave ;
Their office is to illumine and enkindle —

225 p

EDGAR ALLAN POE

My duty to be saved by their bright light,
And purified in their electric fire,
And sanctified in their elysian fire ;
They fill my soul with beauty (which is hope),
And are, far up in heaven, the stars I kneel to
In the sad, silent watches of my night ;
While even in the meridian glare of day
I see them still — two sweetly scintillant
Venuses, unextinguished by the sun."

Le Flambeau Vivant (No. xliv. of the Fleurs
du Mai}.

66 Us marchent devant moi, ces Yeux pleins de

lumiere,

Qu'un Ange tres-savant a sans doute aimantes ;
Us marchent, ces divins fr&res qui sont mes

freres,
Secouant dans mes yeux leurs feux diamante's.

" Me sauvant de tout piege et de tout peche'

grave,

Us conduisent mes pas dans la route du Beau ;
Us sont mes serviteurs et je suis leur esclave ;
Tout mon etre obeit a ce vivant flambeau.

" Charmants Yeux, vous brillez de la clarte'

mystique
Qu'ont les cierges brulant en plein jour ; le

soleil

Rougit, mais n'eteint pas leur flamme fantas-
tique ;

226

THE FRENCH VIEW OF POE

" Us celebrent la Mort, vous chantez le Reveil,
Vous marchez en chantant le reveil de mon ame,
Astres dont nul soleil ne peut fldtrir la
flamme ! "

Although that poem justly takes its place in
Baudelaire's original works, it may let us into
the secret of his understanding of Poe, of the
personal vision of him that he scarcely tried to
impress upon the French nation. It is the
intention of Poe, freed from preoccupations.
For Baudelaire, Poe was the man who refused
all but the beautiful in art, who recognised no
other goal than beauty. Beside this idea all
others fade away, or are pushed out of sight
under any of the purple or rusty gold curtains
that may be hung about the room or over the
couches of aesthetic contemplation. But in the
criticisms that moulded the French view of Poe,
the curtains were allowed more influence than
was their due. Poe was a lover of the beautiful
for its own sake, such a worshipper as Baudelaire
felt himself, but in writing about him, in propa
gating an interest in him in a country where he
was not known, it was tempting to make a pic
turesque view of his life, and tempting, too, to
overlay that reason for his admiration with others
more likely to be generally recognised. It is
impossible not to feel the eagerness to persuade
in such a description of Poe's excellence as this :

227

EDGAR ALLAN POE

" Ce n'est pas par ses miracles materials, qui
pourtant ont fait sa renommee, qu'il lui sera
donne de eonquerir 1'admiration des gens qui
pensent, c'est par son amour du Beau, par sa
connaissance des conditions harmoniques de la
beaute, par sa poesie profonde et plaintive,
ouvragee neanmoins, transparente et correcte
comme un bijou de cristal — par son admirable
style, pur et bizarre, — serre comme les mailles
d'une armure, — complaisant et minutieux, — et
dont la plus legere intention sert a pousser
doucement le lecteur vers un but voulu, — et
enfin surtout par ce genie tout special, par ce
temperament unique qui lui a permis de peindre
et d'expliquer, d'une maniere impeccable, saisis-
sante, terrible, t exception dans tordre moral
Diderot, pour prendre un exemple entre cent,
est un auteur sanguin ; Poe est 1'ecrivain des
nerfs, et meme de quelque chose de plus — et le
meilleur que je connaisse."

But Baudelaire had an almost equal admiration
for another man, a painter, and his picture of
Poe was tinted by his love of Delacroix. Eugene
Delacroix was the great painter of the Romantic
group, who found in Dante, Byron and Shake
speare, a palette of smoking colours, the sul
phurous yellows, stagnant greens, and Tyrian
purples, that Baudelaire preferred for the paint
ing of his soul. His passion for these two men
fused in his mind, and when he wrote

" Comme notre Eugene Delacroix, qui a deve
228

THE FRENCH VIEW OF POE

son art a la hauteur de la grande poesie, Edgar
Poe aime a agiter ses figures sur des fonds
violatres et verdatres, ou se revelent la phosphor
escence de la pourriture et la senteur de Forage "

he made it hard for Frenchmen to see as much
in Poe as he saw himself. He must have been
thinking of "Dante et Vergile conduits par
Phlegias," with its agonised figures in the gloomy
sea and the burning city in the clouds behind.
Delacroix's painting makes the setting of the
picture terrible to those who do not know the
poem, while to those who do, something, perhaps
Dante, seems to have passed away. Poe suffered
in a similar way. The colouring of his tales, lit
up by this comparison, blinded his readers, and
for some time he was read for his colouring
alone.

I suppose the popular French idea of Poe, the
description of him that would be given by a
Frenchman who had not read him to another
who inquired about him, may be best learnt
from Larousse, that delightful illustrated dic
tionary that has a word for everybody, and tells
us that Shakespeare was " the author of a great
number of tragedies and comedies regarded for
the most part as masterpieces." Larousse
labels Poe as " ecrivain Americain d'une imagina
tion dereglee, auteur des Histoires Ewtraordi-
naires" That description too often suffices in

229

EDGAR ALLAN POE

England. It did not long suffice the critical
mind in France.

Baudelaire died in 1867. In 1875 Stephane
Mallarme published a translation of The Raven,
and later an almost complete version of the
poetical works of Poe. Though Baudelaire pre
faced The Philosophy of Composition with a
version of The Raven he held that a fitting trans
lation of the poems was impossible. He felt, like
Shelley, " the vanity of translation ; it were as
wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you
might discover the formal principle of its colour
and odour, as seek to transfuse from one lan
guage into another the creations of a poet. The
plant must spring again from its seed, or it will
bear no flower — and this is the burthen of the
curse of Babel." Perhaps, like Croce, he saw that
" every translation either diminishes and spoils ;
or it creates a new expression, by putting the
former back into the crucible and mixing it with
other impressions belonging to the pretended
translator."* "Dans le moulage de la prose
applique a la poesie, il y a necessairement une
affreuse imperfection ; mais le mal serait encore
plus grand dans une singerie rimee." Mallarme,
conscious of his daring, produced a version of
the poems in a rhythmic prose of whose beauty
an inadequate example has been given in a stanza

* Theory of ^Esthetic. Translated by Douglas Ainslie.
230

THE FRENCH VIEW OF FOE

from La Dormeuse, printed earlier in the book.
Mallarme's translation contains the following
poems : Le Corbeau, Stances a Helene (" Helen,
thy beauty is to me "), Le Palais Hante, Eulalie,
Le Ver Vainqueur, Ulalume, Un Reve dans un
Reve, A Quelquun au Paradis, Ballade de Noces,
Lenore, Annabel Lee, La Dormeuse, LesCloclies,
Israfel, Terre de Songe, A Helene, Pour Annie,
Silence, La bailee d Inquietude, La Cite en la
Mer ; and, under the heading of " Romances et
Vers d' Album," La Romance, Eldorado, Un
Reve, Stances, Feerie, Le Lac, A la Riviere,
Chanson, a M.L.S., A ma mere, a F.S.O., a P.,
Sonnet a la Science, Le Colisee, A Zante. From
the date of this volume's publication French
readers have been able to obtain all the best of
Poe's prose and verse, in their own language, and
written by consummate artists.

With this mass of work before them French
critics began to see Poe with independent eyes. It
is possible to read a man for a long time with
a preconceived and erroneous idea of the quality
that causes your admiration. If you have read
him so, there grows up slowly a vague dissatisfac
tion with yourself and him. It is the business and
happiness of a critic to trace this dissatisfaction
to its source, and so to free other minds for a
truer understanding of their enjoyment. Several
critics have become dissatisfied with the lack of

231

EDGAR ALLAN POE

proportion between the pleasure or intellectual
excitement they have had from Poe, and the
skilful technique and phosphorescent colouring, to
which they had been accustomed to attribute it.
New Poes, other masks, have been made, which,
taken with the old, suggest a closer approximation
to the truth.

M. Camille Mauclair, in one of the essays in a
most interesting book, TArt en Silence,* after
noting that no one has been more methodically
unhappy than Poe (a very suggestive remark),
discovers that Poe the thinker is more important
than Poe the story-teller. I give his ideas as they
are, not without rejoicing in the exaggeration
that is necessary to balance the older conception.
He writes :

" Quand nous avons lu un conte de Poe, nous
n'avons pas oublie Funivers visible pour errer un
instant au pays des songes ; nous avons tire un
nouveau motif de songe et de la contemplation
plus attentive de ce qu'il y a autour de nous.
Nous avons en quelque sorte augmente notre
idealisme par les procede's du materialisme lui-
meme."

He notices that Poe, unlike other fantastic
writers, does not ask us to admire ingenious
combinations of bizarre episodes. " L'imagina-
tion de Poe procede du simple au profond et de

* Paris, 1901.
232

THE FRENCH VIEW OF POE

1'ordinaire a 1'inquietant." I remember, in
parenthesis, Flaubert's remark that " fine sub
jects make mediocre works," and give it a new
application.

Finally, M+ Mauclair thinks of Poe " qu'il fut
un esprit mystique et non critique ; que sa raison
pure etait inversement proportioned a sa raison
pratique ; que la solidarity du genie et du malheur
le constitua tout entier ; que Tart lui fut non
point un but, mais un moyen temporaire de son
idealisme ; qu'on doit avant tout le considerer
comme un philosophe." He suggests that Poe
was working towards the production of a great
book, for which his tales were only prolegomena.
It is indeed possible that, if Poe had lived and
written such a book, he would have thought that
such had been his intention, and wished others
to think so too. But we must remember that
Poe was not such a man except at moments of
his career ; and, that, whatever he was, that he
had always been. In one mood he* would certainly
have agreed with M. Mauclair ; in another, with
Baudelaire. He would have been grateful for M.
Mauclair's opinion when he was writing Eureka.
He would have buttressed himself on Baudelaire's
when, having written it, he nervously added the
little preface that asks for its consideration as a
poem.

In a book published three years after M.
233

EDGAR ALLAN POE

Mauclair's are a series of Marginalia on Poe and
Baudelaire that suggest yet another mask, and
another incarnation.* M. Remy de Gourmont
is one of the subtlest and most liberating of the
school of writers grouped about the Mercure de
France. He is a critic whose pleasure it is to
toss doubts into the air, catch them and throw
them up again as dogmas. His books breathe an
exalted freedom that is only to be won by climb
ing, and he compels his readers to rise as high as
himself by continually cutting the ground from
beneath their feet. I am thinking of the flpnder-
ful Une Nuit au Luxembourg, when Christ
walked in the gardens behind the Odeon, and
the winter night was a summer morning on which
the young journalist, who had dared to say " My
friend " to the luminous unknown in the Church
of Saint- Sulpice, heard him proclaim the for
gotten truth, that men have once called him
Apollo, and that, in one age, his mother had been
Mary, and, in another, Latona. It is a noble
book, an apotheosis of the critical spirit, piercing
false skies one by one, and carrying its reader
higher and higher on the wings of a curiously
disinterested speculation. I write this as a de
scription of the glass through which, in M. Remy
de Gourmont's Marginalia, we look at Poe.
Is it surprising that such a man should find,

* Remy de Gourmont: Promenades Litteraires. Paris, 1904.

234

THE FRENCH VIEW OF FOE

on the one hand, that " les contes ne sont que la
moitie d'Edgar Foe, les po&mes le contiennent
tout entier," and, on the other, " que sa meilleure
definition serait celle-ci : un grand esprit critique."
He mentions the definition in my beloved
Larousse, pointing out that it would serve as
well for Baudelaire, Chateaubriand, Goethe,
Dante, or Flaubert, and continues, " Rien de
plus absurde que d'opposer Fesprit createur a
1'esprit critique." M. Remy de Gourmont has
shown the absurdity of the supposed opposition
in his d^n books, that most obviously combine
the two. Foe had shown it before him, and,
almost as Foe would have said it, he adds,
" Sans la faculte critique, il n'y a point de
creation possible ; on n'a que des poetes chan-
teurs, comme il y a des oiseaux chanteurs."

There seems to be enough of Foe to go round.
Three men as various as Baudelaire, Mauclair
and Gourmont can find in him reflections of
themselves. And beneath them a host of other
writers impotently repeat the old lessons, or
busy themselves with his life and explanations
of his life. M. Arv£de Barine considers Foe
among his Poetes et Nev?*oses in company with
Gerard de Nerval and Hoffmann. Barbey
d'Aurevilly had long before made a similar
comparison. M. Alphorise Seche writes an
account of his life, including the exploded bubble

235

EDGAR ALLAN POE

of his journey to St. Petersburg. M. Paul
Delaunay, Interne des Hopitaux de Paris, dis
cusses him in a pamphlet that he shares with
Hoffmann, called Alcooliques et Nevroses. M.
Teodor de Wyzewa, after talking of " ces vers,
les plus magnifiques, a mon gre, de tous ceux qui
existent dans la langue anglaise," defends his
character; a vain and empty task. M. Emile
Lauvriere, as a " These presentee pour le
Doctorat a la Faculte des Lettres de FUniversite
de Paris," writes two volumes on Un Genie
Morbide, one on the life of Poe, founded on
Woodberry, and the other a rather dull and
sightless criticism on his works. Finally, M.
Emile Hennequin, as long ago as 1889, included
Poe with Dickens, Heine, Turgenev, Dostoievski
and Tolstoy, among his Ecrivainsfrancises.

Poe is indeed, far more than Dickens, an
" ecrivain francise," and perhaps this tumult of
criticism, awakened by the French writer, may
teach us to understand the American. It should
at least widen our conception of him, and show
that he too is among the great men with a
meaning for more than one age, and for men of
more than one temperament. It clears away
those difficulties of language that stood between
himself and us, obscuring him in our narrow
eyes, like the provincial manners that, before
now, have often blinded Londoners to a great

236

THE FRENCH VIEW OF POE

man's worth. It destroys prejudices and cleans
our spectacles. And the cleaning of spectacles
is one of the highest services that the intellect of
a man or of a nation can give to the intellect of
another.

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